Julian Assange.

From Temie Giwa of NigeriansTalk.

Image via Wikipedia

Nigeria’s 50th independence anniversary is on October 1, 2010. To celebrate it, we are running a series titled Nigeria@50 at the groupblog NigeriansTalk. The first in the series, titled One Nigeria: Nigerian Unity 50 years Post-independence, was written by Kola of KTravula. The second is titled Nigeria at 50: Academic Medicine, and was written by Seye of Square One. There will be at least an article a day till October 1.

Follow and join the discussion at NigeriansTalk.org.

Check this out:

“Here’s something you always like to see,” Stewart says, scanning the front page of the Washington Post.“ ‘U.S. Trade Deficit Startles Markets.’ Now, we’ve understood the U.S. trade deficit for a while. Are the markets small children that are easily startled? The next day, they’ll get an unemployment number and go, ‘Oh, I don’t know why we were startled and lost 200 points yesterday; today, we realized the shirt on the chair wasn’t a monster, so we’re going to put 300 points back on the Dow because we’re fucking 5 years old.’ ”

Read it all here. H/T @Dollabrand.

You probably already know about the Freshlyground music video.

Well, in what is probably the least surprising news of the day, the Zimbabwean government has pulled their work visas. Upcoming concerts in Zimbabwe are cancelled.

Listen to band members Zo and Simon talk on the PRI’s Global Hits programme here [mp3].

BBC’s World Business news discusses the soon-to-be-effected East African common market. The common market will include Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda and Rwanda. It will create a trading bloc of about 130 million people. The positive point is that trade will be easier among the countries of the common market, and the common market will be able to bargain as a bloc. The negative point is the fear that freedom of movement of labour will cause problem for local workers. A Ugandan commentator says that many Ugandans think that once the borders are open, Kenyans will flood the market and will out-compete them in the labour market.

Listen to the full audio file is here.

BBC Focus on Africa Magazine:

It is early morning in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and a small independent wholesaler is doing a roaring trade.

The city’s street traders and small independent retailers have come to stock up on household products, one of which is toothpaste.

This wholesaler stocks two brands. The first, the so-called genuine article, is manufactured by Unilever, one of the world’s biggest consumer goods businesses.

The other, the wholesaler describes as “Chinese” – Unilever calls it fake.

By close of business this wholesaler is justifiably pleased. He has sold more tubes of counterfeit toothpaste than the genuine article, which is excellent news for the bottom line.

On the genuine product he has made a 13% mark-up, on the counterfeit an impressive 50%. Fair play to him, some might say – after all it is only toothpaste. Continue reading.

Our 1960 national anthem, given to us as a parting gift by a British housewife in England, had called Nigeria “our sovereign motherland”. The current anthem, put together by a committee of Nigerian intellectuals and actually worse than the first one, invokes the father image. But it has occurred to me that Nigeria is neither my mother nor my father. Nigeria is a child. Gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed and incredibly wayward.

Being a Nigerian is abysmally frustrating and unbelievably exciting. I have said somewhere that in my next reincarnation I want to be a Nigerian again; but I have also, in a rather angry book called The Trouble with Nigeria, dismissed Nigerian travel advertisements with the suggestion that only a tourist with a kinky addiction to self-flagellation would pick Nigeria for a holiday. And I mean both.

Full Guardian article here.

The courts have given the Nigerian cabinet 14 days to determine whether the president is fit to lead the country. You might recall that the president has been away from the country on treatment for close to two months.

From Reuters:

Judge Dan Abutu ordered the cabinet to pass a resolution on Yar’Adua’s fitness within two weeks after a former lawmaker brought a legal case against the government, saying his failure to transfer power was in breach of the constitution.

Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson praises the courts:

There have been other, less blockbuster examples: the courts succeeded in trying tobacco companies for their activities in Nigeria. They’ve gone after Pfizer for drug tests that prosecuting laywers (one is pictured above) say were illegal. Lawyers worked through the courts to end the military detention of the country’s most notorious rebel leader prisoner. (Yes, probably a good thing he was detained. Not so good that he was kept first in Angola and then in a secret cell.) And a whole crew of self-proclaimed human rights lawyers are literally in court every day to defend the country’s people against such ills as police abuse and government-orchestrated property siezures.

Now we’re seeing the same thing again. When Nigerian democracy doesn’t work, the courts are the only place to turn. And turn they do. The lawsuit that mandates this vote on Yar’Adua is just the first of a flood of law suits now demanding that the Nigerian government transition into the hands of the vice president, Goodluck Jonathan. Even if the cabinet votes to keep Yar’Adua in power, the courts will be back to challenge them. You can’t go missing for two months without at least a few of Nigeria’s many lawyers noticing.