My column of this week.

December 25, 2009: A Nigerian-born male, with secondary education in Togo and university education in London, said to have been radicalized during his university days in London, and to have been further radicalized in Yemen, attempted to detonate an ‘incendiary device’ that he had sown into his underwear before getting on a flight to Detroit. The situation was contained with the help of fellow passengers.

The flight originated from Amsterdam Schiphol airport, where the airport security failed to detect the said ‘incendiary device’.

The first reaction of the American Transportation Security Administration was to immediately announce a one-hour rule. This means, among other things, that nobody on a flight bound for the United States is allowed to leave their seat during the last hour of the flight, not even to go to the toilet.

Reacting to this, some commentators complained about how it seems that the US is playing catch-up with terrorists. They wondered whether terrorists would actually repeat their last failed tactic.

Shortly after the news of the Detroit terror attempt, there were debates in the media about whether or not a full-body scanner would have detected that there was some foreign article in the underwear, and if so, whether it would not be better to have full-body scanners in all airports. One should point out that now would be a good time to invest in the shares of companies that manufacture said scanners.

January 3, 2010: The American Transportation Security Administration declared Nigeria ‘a country of special interest’ and added it to a list of countries whose citizens would have to go through ‘enhanced screening’.

Commentators wondered whether it was really wise to alienate potential allies in the fight against extremist Islam, pointing out that Nigerians had done all they could to stop the situation, and that ultimately, it was American officials who dropped the proverbial ball.

Other commentators wondered at the generalization about a country from one isolated case, especially since there was nothing in the young man’s past to suggest that he had been radicalized, or had radicalized others, in Nigeria.

In reply to these, other commentators stressed the fact that Nigeria could be a hotbed of terrorism, especially because there have been what have been largely termed religious violence in the Northern part of the country. In counter-reaction, some pointed out that this is an overtly simplistic take on violent conflicts that are a lot more political than religious.

January 6, 2010: The Nigerian Senate gave the United States a seven-day ultimatum to remove the name of the country from the list. They threatened the severance of diplomatic with the United States if the United States refuses to remove the name of the country from the list.

On the same day, Mrs. Dora Akunyili, Information Minister and rebrander-in-chief of Nigeria, who had earlier tried – albeit unsuccessfully – to distance Nigeria from the young man with poor taste in underwear, said that the inclusion of Nigeria on the list had ‘the potential of undermining long-standing and established US-Nigeria bilateral ties and the goodwill the US enjoys in Nigeria’.

January 7, 2010: Barack Obama, the American President said, at a press conference, ‘we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don’t hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.’

Some commentators said that this was in reaction to those who said that United States was now suffering from a ‘siege mentality’ by introducing measures that some see as becoming, on the one hand, increasingly invasive of individual privacy, and on the other, increasingly isolationist.

Glaringly absent was any mention of the threat by the African superpower.

January 8, 2010: Mr. Michael Aondoakaa, Attorney-General and Minister of Justice of Nigeria, speaking on behalf of a president whose state of mind and health remain largely unknown, allayed fears of any confrontation. He said, ‘we cannot be talking about ultimatum at this stage.’ He also said that the two countries would avoid a potential face-off by resorting to diplomatic solutions to the issue.

To which Petrodollar-land heaved a sigh of relief.

H/T Jeremy

For a more serious analysis.

Update:

From the BBC

The after effects of the alleged attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a passenger plane over the US on Christmas Day continue to be felt.

The Americans are introducing new rules for screening passengers before they board US bound flights.

The rules apply to a list of 14 countries, including – it’s reported- Nigeria, Sudan, Libya, Algeria and Somalia.

The Nigerian government, for one, is not happy.

Information Minister, Dora Akunyili, told a press conference in Abuja that it was wrong to subject Nigerians to such treatment.

From NYTimes: TRUNG SON, Vietnam — It seemed as if this village in northern Vietnam had struck gold when a Chinese and a Japanese company arrived to jointly build a coal-fired power plant. Thousands of jobs would start flowing in, or so the residents hoped.

Four years later, the Haiphong Thermal Power Plant is nearing completion. But only a few hundred Vietnamese ever got jobs. Most of the workers were Chinese, about 1,500 at the peak. Hundreds of them are still here, toiling by day on the dusty construction site and cloistered at night in dingy dormitories.

“The Chinese workers overwhelm the Vietnamese workers here,” said Nguyen Thai Bang, 29, a Vietnamese electrician.

China, famous for its export of cheap goods, is increasingly known for shipping out cheap labor. These global migrants often work in factories or on Chinese-run construction and engineering projects, though the range of jobs is astonishing: from planting flowers in the Netherlands to doing secretarial tasks in Singapore to herding cows in Mongolia — even delivering newspapers in the Middle East.

But a backlash against them has grown. Across Asia and Africa, episodes of protest and violence against Chinese workers have flared. Vietnam and India are among the nations that have moved to impose new labor rules for foreign companies and restrict the number of Chinese workers allowed to enter, straining relations with Beijing.

In Vietnam, dissidents and intellectuals are using the issue of Chinese labor to challenge the ruling Communist Party. A lawyer sued Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung over his approval of a Chinese bauxite mining project, and the National Assembly is questioning top officials over Chinese contracts, unusual moves in this authoritarian state.

Chinese workers continue to follow China’s state-owned construction companies as they win bids abroad to build power plants, factories, railroads, highways, subway lines and stadiums. From January to October 2009, Chinese companies completed $58 billion of projects, a 33 percent increase over the same period in 2008, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

From Angola to Uzbekistan, Iran to Indonesia, some 740,000 Chinese workers were abroad at the end of 2008, with 58 percent sent out last year alone, the Commerce Ministry said. The number going abroad this year is on track to roughly match that rate. The workers are hired in China, either directly by Chinese enterprises or by Chinese labor agencies that place the workers; there are 500 operational licensed agencies and many illegal ones. Continue reading.

No, it is not 419.

The BBC reports:

Charles Taylor ‘duped’ by Nigeria: Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has said he was duped by Nigeria into being arrested there in 2006.

Speaking at his war crimes trial in The Hague, he said Nigeria’s then-leader had reneged on a promise to let him leave the country freely.

He also claimed a plot involving the UK and the US led to his indictment.

Mr Taylor is accused of backing rebels, who committed widespread atrocities throughout the 1990s in Liberia’s neighbour Sierra Leone.

He was living in exile in Nigeria in 2006 when US pressure to put him on trial for alleged war crimes increased.

Mr Taylor now says the president of Nigeria at the time, Olusegun Obasanjo – who is currently a United Nations peace envoy – told him lies that caused him to be arrested.

The full story is here.

here and here.

…came down 20 years ago this month (November 9, 1989). Here is my column on Berlin.

SolomonSydelle just wrote a post examining the reason Nigeria ranks 135 in the Press Freedom 2009 index. Check the post out.

My Bachelors thesis – seems like a world ago now – is a discourse analysis of ideology in Nigerian newspaper editorials. My interests in editorials have come up again, and I am thinking of launching a series over at NigeriansTalk that brings together, at least once a week, editorials of different newspapers. I know it is a rather rough way to measure what is important to the Nigerian press, but it is nevertheless an indication.

For instance, the case of Miss Grace Ushang, the NYSC member who was raped to death on September 27, 2009, came up in a NEXT editorial on October 30, and in a Nigerian Guardian editorial today, November 2. NigeriansTalk’s Nneoma blogged about it on October 22.

I would love to make it a daily affair, but I am so busy I cannot commit to doing that. If anyone is interested in doing it for NigeriansTalk please leave me a message here.

A NEXT editorial.

Yahoo! news:

ABUJA (AFP) – Nigeria on Monday signed a deal worth almost a billion dollars with a state-owned Chinese engineering firm to resuscitate part of its dilapidated railway system, the transport minister said.

The 875-million-dollar (588-million-euro) contract was signed by Transport Minister Ibrahim Isa Bio and the managing director of the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), Zhou Tianxiang, in Abuja.
The deal constitutes the first phase of the country’s railway modernisation plans.

As part of it, a railway track will be rebuilt between the administrative capital Abuja and the northern city of Kaduna — a distance of roughly 200 kilometres (125 miles) — over the next three years.

The Chinese government has granted Nigeria a concessionary loan of 500 million dollars for the project.
There are also plans to reconstruct a 1,315-kilometre track between Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub in the southwest and the northern city of Kano.

Once the pride of the nation, Nigeria’s railways have, like much of the rest of the country’s infrastructure, crumbled over the years.

Nigeria has a network of thousands of kilometres (miles) of narrow-gauge single track lines, covering nine of the country’s 36 states. Most of its locomotives broke down long ago.

The only passenger service still operating in the country takes two hours to link central Lagos with Ijoko, a small commuter town less than 30 kilometres (20 miles) away.

Yesterday I read a journal article on the hypersexualisation of blacks and the redefinition of citizenship in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In plain English, German women saw black men as exotic consumables – blacks here meaning both Africans and African American GIs. But the experiences in both cases are radically different. It is a really interesting article that tries to cover the two different accounts. I’ve learnt quite a bit about this from conversations with Africans who were in Berlin when the Wall came down.

A friend sent me this story today about a German journalist who goes undercover to discover life as a black person in Germany. Still trying to decide whether I should watch the movie he made from the experience. Wondering why I can’t decide? Read the Der Spiegel article for yourself.