February 27th, 2009 by Eseosa Aigbogun
Nokia 1208
My favourite cell phone manufacturer is the Finish Company Nokia, you may call it brand loyalty, I won’t argue because that is what I am known for. I will continue to patronise a particular brand till it disappoints me. Since I obtained my first mobile phone in 2004, I have always used a Nokia.
I always loved Nokia because of their durability, ruggedness and affordability (you would most likely get a Nokia for any level in the economic ecosystem). Let me clear something first; I have never used a luxury or smart phone. My phone has never sung a pop song or even my favourite rock tunes. I have never used my phone to take a picture, because it can. Please don’t go there, play what video? My phone cannot connect to the internet or even transfer files. I’m sure you get it now, I use cheap phones, the type that only makes or receives call and sends text messages (I sure love text messages, they are so cheap and you get to say a lot - 160 characters per page). Ok, before I forget, it occasionally wakes me up or reminds me of what I need to do. It has become a handy calculator when I get lazy with numbers. However, these are not the actual reason why I so love my phone.
Read the rest of this entry »
June 17th, 2008 by Eseosa Aigbogun
Going to work on a given morning, the atmosphere seem very dull and lifeless, then it occurred to me; this is what most mornings look like, just that today my mind wasn’t busy so I took note of my surrounding. There was nothing new in what I saw, noticed, or felt. It was all lifeless because there was no electricity. That is the default feel across most major cities in the country.
Read the rest of this entry »
March 29th, 2008 by Eseosa Aigbogun
AIDS, Poverty, Malaria, Conflict and other vices that seem to befall Africa are really not the issue, at least not the main issues. The solutions to all these would fall in place with good and focused leadership. Leadership is what Africa and most African countries lacks. This is the course of our woes and rectifying that would rectify every other issue.
Read the rest of this entry »
March 18th, 2008 by Eseosa Aigbogun
Well this is a very personal assertion and cannot be said to be exhaustive as I have not encountered every single business in this country. In fact none in the commercial capital Lagos, which is the heart and soul of business in Nigeria. However, it deserves to be taken seriously as it cuts across some of the most active business sectors in Nigeria.
Read the rest of this entry »
January 10th, 2008 by Eseosa Aigbogun
Listening to the Christmas message of Pope Benedict XVI one would be tempted to conclude that Africa is a brewery for crises. Most of the conflicts in the world today are in Africa; Somalia, Uganda, Sudan, DR Congo, Zimbabwe, Niger, Chad, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Algeria and Kenya. Yes Kenya the new comer.
Although Somalia and Sudan may be the biggest in the continent, every single one of these conflicts is having very dire consequences within and outside the continent and mostly within the country. Think of what the crisis in the Niger Delta of Nigeria is doing to international oil prices, or what the crisis in Ivory Coast means to the global cocoa market.
Read the rest of this entry »
January 10th, 2008 by Eseosa Aigbogun
Online shopping is one of the benefits of a world that is today integrated by the web. I spent one full year going from one bookshop to another in two major cities in Nigeria searching for a book, Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel - 4th Ed., still didn’t get it. Well finally I acquired a prepaid Master Card and created an account with Amazon and ebay. I got a cheap about $21, shipment excluded, on ebay and tried to buy it. However when I tried to fill in my Master Card details Nigeria wasn’t listed on the payment page, I contacted the customer service and they suggested I use paypal. Well option two was to pay by paypal which was the preferred option of most of the merchants on ebay. So I had to register on paypal, which is also a product of ebay. How did that go? Once again Nigeria was not listed on paypal so I sent an email to paypal’s customer service.
Read the rest of this entry »
December 18th, 2007 by Eseosa Aigbogun
In ancient china it was believed that humans where naturally well meaning and in the process of growing they learn to be bad. Well that was ancient china. In recent times, I have found humans to be almost naturally evil and it takes effort to be well meaning. I have noticed that people are mostly untruthful even when it makes no sense to lie; it is just part of them.
I will start with an example we see every day in Nigeria. We take public buses as a means of transportation. Ok, you are in a hurry, maybe apparently, the bus conductors announces the destination of the bus so you know which to take. These conductors would also say “one chance”, meaning the bus would be filled by just one person. This makes you jump into the bus, but you find out that the bus in actually empty. This is a violation of all consumers protecting laws in place in this country. But this happens everyday, it is part of the business. I could get angry and refuse to take a bus where the driver or the conductors is deceptive. Even when you step out of that bus, the next bus is also announcing “one chance” while it is still empty.
One chance in Lagos means a different thing. This time the bus is actually filled but with just one chance. Please don’t get onboard. It happens that this is a criminal plot to lure unsuspecting victims unto the bus. The bus is filled by a gang and no sooner would the bus have moved when you will be faced with guns and robbed of all you possessions.
Read the rest of this entry »
December 18th, 2007 by Eseosa Aigbogun
I consider the “one laptop per child” project a very laudable one; children all over the world would be given a very rare opportunity to be on an equal footing with those from industrialised countries. We all know that the tool and agent of transformation of today’s world is in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Africa’s ability to effectively plug into today’s global world has being greatly hampered by her inability to acquire the relevant ICT infrastructures and the inability to train her citizen on the relevant technologies.
Read the rest of this entry »
December 1st, 2007 by Eseosa Aigbogun
Preparing for an aptitude test recently, I picked up a now very popular study guide. It is titled “Master Job Aptitude Test” popularly known as, GMAT.
The cover page boasts of over “7,500 real past questions with detailed answer explanations for bank, oil companies, multinationals, private companies etc.”, and “Most Recent Tests with Key Facts”. This book is published yearly - good business sense - and if it were to be a pop album, I’m optimistic that every year each edition would go platinum 70 times, of course assuming zero piracy.
Read the rest of this entry »
December 1st, 2007 by Eseosa Aigbogun
Nigeria as one of the largest oil producing countries in the worlds ought to be smiling to the bank with soaring oil prices as the Gulf States are doing. However, that is far from being the case. Nigeria exports crude oil (raw materials) and import refined oil to meet domestic demands. The oil rich State ends up buying very expensive refined oil as the countries that refines the oil have to make their profits upon the high cost of buying crude.
What this means is that even though we are an oil producing State, we are also directly hit by the rising oil prices as we are also a major importer of refined crude considering a population of over 140 million.
Read the rest of this entry »
