Nigeria

Thursday

The Spectator

Why does Britain’s fight for religious freedom stop at Dover?

‘We don’t do God,’ was Alastair Campbell’s put-down when his charge, Tony Blair, was tempted to raise the issue of his faith. Unfortunately, it seems to have become the motto of David Cameron’s government. It is a month now since 276 girls were kidnapped from a school near the town of Chibok in northern Nigeria, and still the Foreign Office’s statements on the crisis read like a deliberate exercise in missing the point. ‘Continuing murders and abductions of schoolchildren, particularly girls in Nigeria by Boko Haram, are a stark reminder of the threat faced by women and girls in conflict-prone areas,’ Mark Simmonds, minister for Africa, said this week. ‘Young

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The ‘selfie’ protest

The kidnapping of the 276 predominantly Christian schoolgirls by Islamic terror group Boko Haram is an atrocity, but it is not the first atrocity they have committed. It is just the first one to trip the West’s interest switch. A girl’s right to an education has become an important pillar in western ideology, and an important pawn in the battle against radical Islam. It is why Malala has seen herself elevated to an almost saint-like position. The recent kidnappings have enraged western sensibilities, because they desecrate hallowed ideas about female equality. The West has responded in the only way it knows how: a self-righteous selfie protest using the hashtag ‘Bring Back

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Beyond the Malachite Hills, by Jonathan Lawley; Last Man In, by John Hare – review

In post when the curtain came down on Britain’s African empire, there survives today a generation of colonial officers whose numbers are dwindling fast. Many were fired by an idealism already out of fashion when they chose their career. Most came to love their adopted continent. Some can write. Two of these are Jonathan Lawley and John Hare. Each has an incredible tale to tell. Here is a pair of books that, placed with a decanter of whisky on the bedside table of any Spectator reader’s guest bedroom, will have the reading-light burning late into the night. Yet they are very different stories, quite differently written. Beyond the Malachite Hills

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

Boko Haram proves the Nigerian government to be corrupt and useless

You know, the more we hear about the uselessness of the Nigerian government in dealing with the abduction – the rape, in the original sense of the word – by Boko Haram of 230-odd schoolgirls, the less appealing that government appears. The most striking and urgent action it took in response to the crisis in the three weeks since it happened was yesterday to arrest Naomi Mutah Nyadar, one of the women behind the mass demonstrations calling on the unhappily named president, Goodluck Jonathan, to get a grip and do something. Apparently his wife Patience took against her because she spoke about rescuing “our daughters” when in fact she was

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Forget the MINTs, the next economic success story will be in the BALLS

Jim O’Neill, the Mancunian former chief economist of Goldman Sachs in London, commands attention whenever he speaks and has a claim to fame as the coiner in 2001 of the acronym ‘Bric’ for the four rapidly developing countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China — to which economic power looked set to shift during the early part of the new century. Undeterred by the hindsight view that he should have gone for ‘Bic’, like the throwaway razor, because Russia has lagged so dismally behind the others on almost every measure of progress, O’Neill has now come up with ‘Mint’, for Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, as the next cohort of economic

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Bye-bye Bric, hello Mint — are Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey really the new boom economies?  

New year new ideas as we woke up on Monday morning to find ourselves in Lagos with Evan Davies trying to convince us that Nigeria really is undergoing an economic earthquake. It’s part of a week-long campaign by Radio 4 to make us believe that the next economic leaders among world nations will be Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey. These new Mint countries are destined, we are told, to take over from the Bric countries, now deemed passé after just a decade in the limelight generated by the economist fashionistas. It’s stimulating stuff for this hibernating time of year. Bulletins and programmes high on optimism and imbued with the belief that

Thursday

James Tooley

Malala for free schools

That Malala Yousafzai, the girl the Taleban tried to murder, is a brave and resolute young woman is not in doubt. The youngest person ever nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, she has won many awards, including the Sakharov Prize and an honorary degree from Edinburgh University, in her campaign for ‘the right to -education’. But something curious is going on. Something crucial to her experience is always omitted when her life and mission are described by international agencies and the media. Education International, the global teachers’ union umbrella group, is typical. Malala is campaigning, they say, so that all can benefit from ‘equitable public education’; that is, government education.

Thursday

John L-Allen-Jr

The war on Christians

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion? Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of

Thursday

Simon Akam

419 by Will Ferguson – review

The term ‘419’ is drawn from the article in the Nigerian penal code that addresses fraud. However, it has transcended its origins in statute and become shorthand for trickery across West Africa. When I worked as a correspondent in Sierra Leone, 1,400 miles from Nigeria’s capital Abuja, the phrase was in widespread use. Deception is fertile ground for fiction, and Will Ferguson has produced a fine novel from the West African variant. He takes 419 in its purest form: the email scam. Nigerian hustlers persuade foreigners to part with their savings, often with the promise of a tranche of a fortune that just needs a western bank account to park

Sunday

Rod Liddle

To infinity and beyond!

Let’s hear it for Nigeria, which has just joined the space race. The country plans to launch a rocket by 2028, although nobody has explained where the rocket will be heading. It is a legal requirement, I suspect, for all countries which receive vast amounts of aid from Britain to start pinging rockets around the universe. Perhaps the Nigerians are hopeful of colonising Jupiter, or the ghostly moons of Uranus – Oberon, say, or Umbriel. Both satellites would undoubtedly benefit from some warm-hearted Nigerian vibrancy. We’re giving the Nigerians more than £300m next year, which should pay for the elastic band, at least. Our previous donations were revealed to have

Thursday

Anthony Cummins

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ghana Must Go, by Taiye Selasi – review

Excitement over the extraterritorial birthplace of authors on Granta’s recent list of Britain’s best young novelists must have been old news in the United States, where the New Yorker’s equivalent exercise four years ago turned up Americans from China, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Latvia, Nigeria, Peru, Russia and Serbia. Roughly speaking, this immigrant fiction makes a threefold appeal: it’s exotic, yet familiar (‘our’ culture measured by the standards of another), with a hairshirt’s prickle, too (by showing how short we fall). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel briefly features an eight-year-old Pennsylvanian boy who, before his nanny arrived from Nigeria, never knew that oranges contained pips. Americans in Americanah are inauthentic,

Sunday

David Blackburn

Wole Soyinka: Boko Haram must be destroyed | 18 November 2012

The Books Blog has an interview with Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Soyinka is worth listening to for his ambivalence towards nationalism, his tolerant secularism and his recollection of solitary confinement during Nigeria’s civil war in the 1960s. But his comments on Boko Haram, the radical Islamist group that is terrorising northern and central Nigeria, are worth quoting here on a weekend of bloodshed in the Middle East. ‘I look at Boko Haram not just as a terrorist group, but also as a criminal gang, and a bunch of psychopaths. You don’t enter into dialogue with drug lords and criminals. It

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

The evil being perpetrated against Christians in Nigeria

The religious cleansing against Christians is intensifying in Nigeria, where Christians have been told they have until Friday to leave the country or face attacks by Islamic extremists. As I wrote recently in the Daily Telegraph, this is a trend sweeping the Middle East. Thousands are fleeing Iraq and Egypt, but Nigeria is the scene of the most ferocious attacks. Its government condemns the attacks, but seems unable to respond to the Boko Haram menace. This from the National Review: ‘Catholic archbishop John Onaiyekan, of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, appealed for help. “It’s a national tragedy. We are all unsecured. It’s not only Catholic. Today it’s us. Tomorrow we don’t

Saturday

Michela Wrong

Not for sissies

Nigeria is not exactly a tourist destination. A colleague chortles over the memory of trying to wangle his way in — without a journalist’s visa — during Sani Abacha’s military regime. ‘Purpose of visit?’ barked the immigration man. ‘Tourism,’ he lied. ‘No one comes to Nigeria for tourism,’ said the official. He was promptly expelled. The official was voicing a truism. Even seasoned Western adventurers avoid Nigeria — ‘is Lagos airport as terrifying as they say?’ you are often asked — while the country’s oil-fattened elite, oscillating between the national superiority complex and hardened self-loathing, regard an international flight as the obligatory start to any holiday. Writing a travel book

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Costs of Closed Borders

There are many reasons to read James Fallows’ Atlantic article on what happens when your email is hacked (and anyyone who uses gmail should definitely read it) but buried within it is this snippet on the In “The Chilling Story of Genius in a Land of Chronic Unemployment,” this past May in TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy portrayed a number of the hackers she had met in Lagos. In other circumstances, she said, the best of them might have been like Sergey Brin or Max Levchin, the immigrants who co-founded Google and PayPal, respectively. They were that clever and technically gifted. Or, more modestly, they could have been like the engineers and

Saturday

Sebastian Smee

Cross-cultural exchanges

The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity. The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity. There’s great comedy — and also artistry — in this because almost every story actually describes some degree of false consciousness, wrong-headedness or pathetic illusion. Life