Nigeria 2 - Senegal 1

Wow, A heartstopping match. I was really fearful that Nigeria would fail after Senegal scored that first goal late in the second half and appeared to have the upper hand, until Martins and Kanu got their act together and scored those two winning goals in the final 15 minutes.

As I mentioned before Nigeria only had to draw to top the table, The shock of the day though is Zimbabwe's 2-1 victory over Ghana. If I could have picked two teams to go through it would have been Nigeria and Ghana, as those are the two countries I have the closest ties with. Instead Senegal take the runner up position to reach the Quarter Finals.

Now there's a few days wait till Feb 4th Where Nigeria will play the Group C Runner-Up, Tunisia. I have no idea how that will go. I imagine it will be at least as tough as Senegal today.

Of the five African teams that Qualified for the World Cup 2006 only Ivory Coast and Tunisia are still in the Cup of Nations tournament. Joining them in the Quarter finals stage are Egypt, Cameroon, DR Congo, Guinea, Senegal and of course Nigeria.

All the details are covered by the BBC here.

Nigeria 2 - Zimbabwe 0

Congratulations again to the Super Eagles who defeated Zimbabwe last night. It seems the Zimbabwe team learned something from their recent defeat against Nigeria of 5-1 in Abuja.

The Group standings now mean that everything rests on the next game with Senegal. Nigeria need to draw to qualify top of the group. If they should lose then their chance of reaching the Quarter finals will rest on Ghana not beating Zimbabwe by more than 1 goal.

In other news I start one of my OU courses today. MT262 Putting computers to work. This course uses C++, which I haven't worked with for a few years, but I am very interested in picking up again. I think I should have completed the first Unit soon, most of it seems to be about configuring the software.

Nigeria 1 - Ghana 0

Just thought I'd post a message congratulating the Super Eagles on a great start to the African Cup of Nations 2006. I was a little worried throughout the match, I felt Nigeria deserved it though in the end. At least the Ghanaians have the world cup to look forward to, the Nigerian team will be watching on TV for the first time since USA '94.

It's probably best I leave the sports commentary to the experts but I'll just say the Group Nigeria is in is certainly tough, but beating Ghana was a great start. Nigeria play Zimbabwe on Friday 27th but more worryingly, Senegal on the 31st Jan.

I just realised today that it's not long at all before we kick off the 6 nations rugby tournament, with the classic Wales vs. England match on 4th February the second match of the first day of the tournament. I get the feeling it won't be such a ride this year - especially as it's at Twickenham.

Happy New Year

Thought I'd better say happy new year, I hope it's even better than 2005, for all of you.

I'm just reviewing the last years statistics for this blog. This site had 14,272 sessions with 50,477 page views in 2005. That's a big part of the reason why I had to make some edits, to avoid embarassment!

Based on those numbers it seems that most visitors visit other parts of the site, they don't just stay on the front page, which is very encouraging. On average it's 3.54 pageviews per session.

So this is a BIG thank you to everyone who's taken the time to read through these pages, it's a little strange to me that so many are interested. I would love it if more visitors would drop comments so I can know peoples feelings. Most of the comments so far seem to be encouraging me to talk a bit more about Nigeria and Less about my work, so I'll try to change to that style from now on.

I plan to try and visit some different and interesting parts of Nigeria to take photos and write about them. This is something I saw today in another bloggers site [in french], a Frenchman who seems to visit much more interesting places than I do. I can't understand french very well but I can just about get the gist of what is being written about and I'm already asking questions about a field trip to Idanre. Here's another link about Idanre

To try and encourage more comments I am toying with the idea of relaxing the rule that all comments must be from registered blogger accounts. I'm aware that this will also open the doors to spammers, trolls and other idiots who will want to waste everybodys time. I do of course have the ability to remove comments that I don't like so I think if I can keep track of each new comment I'll be able to weed out the troublemakers.

So, for a trial period, comments are now open to anybody, but I am moderating them!

13 Nigerian Banks to be Liquidated!

Seems like the Nigerian Banks are finally getting the shake up they need. After a long period of consolidation through mergers and raising capital by selling shares there are now at least 64 fewer banks. An additional 13 have failed to raise the 25 Billion Naira (around £100 million GPB or 180 million USD) of capital they require and are likely to be liquidated soon. Nigerian Banks previously had to have 2 Billion Naira Captital reserves to legally trade as a bank so you can see the difficulty some have had in acheiving this 12 fold increase.

I shudder to think what this means for anyone with substantial amounts of money on deposit with these 13 banks which according to Nigerian Press are ACB International Bank, Afex Bank, Allstates Trust Bank, Assurance Bank, City Express Bank, Eagle Bank, Fortune Bank, Gulf Bank, Hallmark Bank, Liberty Bank, Metropolitan Bank, Trade Bank and Triumph Bank. Anybody with money in these banks should probably think about that!

You can follow the story at the BBC and for the next 24 hours at least at the Nigerian Press websites such as This Day and Guardian