Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Nigeria and Me.

I've had a number of comments asking why I'm not back in Nigeria.

Simple fact is that I was Supposed to be starting work on a new project in Nigeria at the beginning of the year but as those of you who have done business in Nigeria will no doubt know, such things very rarely happen on time in Nigeria, especially when elections are due.

I work with a formula, which I'm sure is a re-utterance of many other more enlightened people:

Time to do Business in Nigeria = Time Anticipated * Nigerian Factor


The Nigerian Factor is a concept quite hard to grasp without spending time in Nigeria. In my experience, in this formula it can be expressed as a number between 2 and infinity. The number is proportional to the number of people involved in the contract process with weighting for the political seniority of those involved and inversely proportional to the amount of bribes thrown around. Clearly bribery is out of the question if we want to keep our morals intact, so waiting is what we do.

Unless the miracle happens and a contract is signed I will be sitting here in the UK. I can't wait forever, so I may be making some difficult choices soon.

Meanwhile, I am just submitting my first sets of coursework for my two OU courses for this year, M256: "Software Development with Java" and T209: "Information and Communication Technologies: people and interactions".

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4 Comments:

Blogger culturalmiscellany said...

I am sure you'll be back there soon enough. I bet your fiancee is missing you. I do understand that Nigeria and business can be a bit of a tricky combination.

As a side things if you know of any hotels in Calabar that are good please do let me know as I'm heading off there soon.

06-Mar-2007 16:23:00  
Blogger Aaron Rowe said...

fiancée is fine, don't worry. Can't give you details because she's requested me not too and she does read this!

Sorry, I haven't been to Calabar, but I wish I could go. Didn't Jeremy of Naijablog go there a few months ago?

25-Mar-2007 22:05:00  
Blogger E_ji80 said...

Hello. I haven't read U'r blog in a while and I have never commented on it before, but I laught out loud at your evalution of time in Nigeria. * the Nigeria factor: understadable only by those that have spent time in Nigeria, Impossible to explain to any one else. I think you got it just right. :)

05-Jun-2007 23:27:00  
Blogger Aaron Rowe said...

@e_ji80: Cheers.

I hope to update this blog soon...

06-Jun-2007 01:02:00  

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