Sunday 27 April 2014

Frank Nneji- Founder, Associated Bus Company [ABC] Transport Limited


Necessity is the mother of invention, the sages have long taught us; if you are uncomfortable about something then do something about it, the motivational speakers have since drummed into our ears. Are they right? I sure believe they are!!!
What else can transform a company which started two decades ago with about N1 million share-capital to N800 million? Or diversify an ordinary road transport company into a multi-faceted, hydra-headed business empire spanning the hospitality, haulage, and courier industries? A worthy invention I say and a man of character at the helm of affairs.

Frank Nneji is that man and Associated Bus Company [ABC] Transport is the company. Of course I have had my issues with ABC, but that does not detract from the story of persistence and entrepreneurial dexterity which has translated to 20 plus years of leadership in the transport market-place, job opportunities and added value to the country at large.

Another 1960’s man, Frank Uzoawuotu Nneji hails from Imo State of Nigeria. His growing years were spent in the village with his family of nine. After his secondary education, Nneji gained admission into the University of Nigeria Nsukka, where he graduated with a degree in Zoology in 1982. Evidently his mother desired that her children would be medically inclined, however you can take a horse to the stream, but you can’t force it to drink. Nneji discovered his entrepreneurial skill set early on, and gathered a tidy sum of money publishing and selling past question papers. From this venture, he made enough money to travel to Italy on a student rebate ticket where he purchased clothing items for sale.

As soon as he was done with the burden of studying, Nneji dusted out his entrepreneurial shoes for good. He set up a company, Rapido, which supplied educational materials. He started out supplying writing boards, most of which he made himself and he grew that little board company into the leading producer and marketer of audio-visual products in West Africa.

In the pursuit of his Rapido dream, Nneji engaged in frequent, unsafe and uncomfortable bus rides. While others groaned and complained, or suffered silently as most Nigerians do, the beginnings of a new business empire were busily hatching in his head. Uppermost on his mind was comfort, safety, and a general enjoyment by the passenger of the whole road travel experience.

Boom! And it came to pass that in 1993, Nneji was ready to fly. With a loan and 5 Hiace buses, the dream was on; and boy, did it catch fire. Hitherto existing bus companies started attempting to pattern their services after ABC’s, but if it no be panadol, e no be panadol*. Their operations in Nigeria spans the entire country; north, south east and west. They have even gone on to establish a Coach West Africa in 2004 which journeys through the West African countries in a scenic, informative and actually entertaining ride. [I have been a witness]. In 2006, ABC transport became a Public Liability Company, making it the first transport company in Nigeria to be mentioned on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

Nneji who went on to undertake an Executive programme at Wharton Business School, Philadelphia, USA and a Chief Executive programme at Lagos Business School, Lagos has been honoured with several awards for his innovations in the transport industry which includes: Award of Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) by the Federal Republic of Nigeria (2005) Auto Personality of the Year 2004 by Auto World, Award of Excellence in Business (2005) for efficient transport service delivery by Aba Chamber of Commerce amongst others. ABC Transport has been adjudged the Best Transporter in Nigeria by the Chartered Institute of Transport and has since then consistently won the National Bus Operator of the Year Award along with other accolades by renowned bodies.

‘Good thinking, good product.’
By Jennifer Nkem-Eneanya

Chioma Chukwuka-Akpotha; Actress, Producer and Nollywood’s Sweetest Heart

Any avid fan of Nollywood [Nigeria’s movie industry] from the beginning of the new millennium must have watched with pride as she matured and upped her game from movie to movie and year to year. From minor roles to challenging lead roles, Chioma has surely made her mark in Nollywood for all time.

Born in 1980, the dashing damsel, wife and mother of two’ hails from Anambra State in Eastern Nigeria. Her early education was at Onward Nursery and Primary School, Lagos State at the conclusion of which she proceeded to Federal Government Girls College, Onitsha, Anambra State. Chioma is an alumnus of Lagos State University and a graduate of Banking and Finance.

The talented Chioma did not undergo any professional training in the arts; sheer aptitude and a passion for acting were all the tools she required to make an indelible stamp in the industry and the hearts of her ever-increasing fan base. In 2000, she starred in her first movie, ‘The Apple’ where she acted as an obstinate 17-year old who felt she was sufficiently matured for marriage.

A mere seven years after her first movie, Chioma was nominated for, and won the ‘Best Actress in a Leading Role’ award at the prestigious Africa Movie Academy Awards in 2007 for her role in ‘Sins of the Flesh.’ She has since featured in over 60 movies, the most recent being ‘On Bended Knees’ which she also co-produced alongside veteran Producer and Director, Emem Isong; who is very much on my to-do list of star features. Other previous movies include Red Soil (2008), Double Game (2007), Ass on Fire, Asunder, Chinwe Okeke, Dead in Faith, Desperate Ambition, End of Discussion, Games Men Play, Holy Family, Last Dance, Naked Sin, On My Wedding Day, Royal Doom, Royal Insult, The Saint, Saviour, and the Serpent in Paradise all in 2006; a lot on her plate for just one year! A lot more movies happened between 2002 and 2005 as well.

Like I have been known to say, when you have got your acts right, men, nay kings of men will come knocking at the door of your enterprise; and so it is with our Nollywood sweetheart who is also a brand ambassador for telecom giant, Globacom and FMCG Company, Reckitt Benckiser.

Chioma’s movie as a pioneer Producer was premiered in May, 2013 and set to show in cinemas around the country. In an interview with Bella Naija, Chioma stated her hopes and plans come 2014; “I hope that by my next birthday, I would have done another movie and grown from this level. There is no stagnancy in the industry. If you don’t see an actor for a period of time in movies, it doesn’t mean they are not doing something. Some are directing, some are producing, some are rebranding. There is no dry moment. For me, I want to move to another level by my next birthday.”

Supermodel Oluchi Onweagba-Orlandi; The Timeless Face of Africa

It came down to that final moment; standing on a stage in Zimbabwe, amidst other apposite contestants; her name was announced and her life changed forever. Oluchi, face of Africa became her new calling card, all at the age of 17.


Born Oluchi Onweagba, from Eastern Nigeria in 1982, the lissom beauty was soon on her way into the world of global high fashion, runways for designers of note, and gracing the covers of some of the world’s most fashionable magazines. To put it mildly, she went, she saw, and she conquered.

For the girl that she once was, who was scorned for her tall leanness, Oluchi sure has a reason to vaunt her gauntness in womanhood. A 3-year contract with Elite Modelling Management as a prize for winning ensured that even in the face of her prior inexperience, Oluchi excelled in the high-powered world of international fashion; the kind we can only imagine or covet through our TV screens.

For an African woman who has walked for some of the world’s greatest designers including Chanel, Christian Dior, Gucci, Luca Luca, Tommy Hilfiger and Kenneth Cole, from New York to Milan and Paris, Oluchi’s life journey must be quite a story; thrust as it were, into the laps of glitterati from her life as a teenager in the suburbs of Lagos. Cognisant of a life after modelling, Oluchi received an associate’s degree in Business Organization and Management from NYU, and plans to take more business classes in the future.
                
Presently living in South Africa with her husband, designer Luca Orlandi of Luca Luca and child, Oluchi birthed her own modelling Agency, O Model Africa in 2008 with the desire to enable prospective models gain the experience and exposure that they need to take their game to the next level.

In April 2013, Oluchi obtained the rights to Tyra Banks’ “Next Top Model” franchise through her company, LuLu Productions. The African version, “Africa’s Next Top Model” would be sponsored by the South African Tourism Ministry.

Oluchi Orlandi spends her free time in charitable pursuits and is a volunteer at a few NGO’s including LEAP Africa.

http://www.konnectafrica.net/oluchi-onweagba-orlandi-the-face-of-africa/

In Lagos, the 1% Takes Stock

By Nina Burleigh

A burgeoning wealthy class is settling into one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities, attracting designers, world-class architects and a growing creative community that seeks to preserve its culture through art and fashion.

The Land Cruisers and Range Rovers began lining up on a steamy Sunday afternoon outside Tafawa Balewa Square long before sunset. The banking tycoon Otunba Subomi Balogun was hosting his 80th birthday party and nobody wanted to be late, and there was also the matter of inching past the press of beggars living in the square’s arcade. Once through a security line, women in gold headdresses and men in white robes disembarked. Balogun lives in a mansion modeled on the White House, furnished entirely in white and gold, and the invitation had asked guests to wear his favorite colors.
Guests sashayed through the tent doors into a scene of surreal opulence. At the far end of the tent, engulfed by servants, courtiers, national politicians and guards with wires in their ears, the celebrant perched beside his wife on a throne covered with white faux fur, his every move broadcast on flat-screens arrayed around the tent walls. From the throne, the founder of the First City Monument Bank (F.C.M.B.) could survey his 1,000 guests, acres of floral arrangements and goldfish ponds brought in for the occasion, and the legion of waiters ferrying Taittinger and Veuve Clicquot and steaming trays of traditional Nigerian stews and rice. Bands and dancers performed in succession, a professional actress emceed and business and blood royalty mingled with state governors and the archbishop of Lagos. Massive cakes, one a replica of Balogun’s columned white house, and one designed to match his white Rolls-Royce, were stationed in front of the head table.
Governors began their speeches by acknowledging “the celebrant” and other honored guests whom they referred to as “your royal majesties.” The archbishop gave a benediction calling on God’s blessings. Another elderly gentleman, a childhood friend of Balogun, croaked out a rendition of “Happy Birthday.” In their formality and vocabulary, the speeches came from another era, Victorian perhaps. If a speaker could find a three-syllable word to replace a one-syllable word, he chose it. But nobody paid any attention at all. The younger guests were too busy networking, exchanging business cards and tapping numbers into their phones. Nigerians, I was told, often look like they are partying, but they never stop doing business.

The world may still associate Nigeria with the legendary Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti and online credit card scams, but the nation is now home to one of the wealthiest microcommunities in the world. These global super-elites educate their young in Swiss boarding schools and at Oxford or Princeton, pay cash for luxury homes and cars, and hold major London and New York real estate parcels in their portfolios.

As of last year, Nigeria was the 11th largest oil-producing nation in the world. Otunba Balogun and the men of his generation amassed giant fortunes because they were in the right place and knew the right people when Nigeria began nationalizing its oil in 1971. Home to great petro-fortunes, Lagos is Dallas minus the glittery malls and pedicured blondes – although the shops are starting to come in. It is a city of mind-boggling extremes. The average life expectancy in Nigeria is about 53 years, and citizens rich and poor struggle with hourly power outages and obtain their own potable water, which the poor often carry home on their heads. A small elite live in walled enclaves where palms and bougainvillea shield Porsche collections, new palaces and swimming pools. According to a recent study by New World Wealth, the number of Nigerian millionaires is expected to reach 23,000 by 2017. As in oil-rush Texas, crazy rags to riches stories abound. More than two decades ago, the oil billionaire Folorunsho Alakija, reputedly the second-richest woman in Africa, was a fashion designer with a high-end clientele that included the then-president’s wife, Maryam Babangida. The story goes that her connection to Babangida led her to be “dashed,” or “gifted” in Nigerian pidgin English, with a license to explore a deep offshore oil block, which was then thought to be too expensive to drill. Today it spews up to 250,000 barrels daily.

The four generations of guests at Balogun’s 80th were all as tied to London as to Lagos, but the younger generations have almost no links to the provincial and traditional Nigeria of Balogun’s generation. While the “chiefs” – as some of the rich old guys are known, based on Yoruba tradition – still speak Yoruba or one of the many other tribal languages, their kids and grandkids have childhood memories involving blancmange or Yorkshire pudding, not dried plantains. The old chiefs sent their children abroad to be schooled and educated. Now those children are adults and are coming home, lured by business returns and fortunes beyond Wall Street’s wildest dreams. The returnees, as they are known, are familiar with the comforts of Western cities, but don’t mind generating their own electricity and paying for private water for their homes. They have a toughness their softer counterparts in the global 1 percent lack. One of the returnees who showed up at Balogun’s party, Kene Mkparu, 47, earned two advanced degrees in London before coming to Lagos with his wife and small children a few years ago. He co-foundedFilmhouse Cinemas, which plans to build 25 theaters in Nigeria in the next six years. His kids don’t even notice when the lights flick off. “They just keep on playing,” he said. “It’s frustrating here, because there isn’t a lot of logical thinking. But we are kind of like the Europeans who came here hundreds of years ago. They didn’t let the mosquitoes bother them because they were focused on the gold.”

Younger Nigerians see uncharted marketing territory and opportunities to link Africa to the West and vice versa. The publicist Ngozi Omambala moved to Lagos in 2007 after working in the music industry in London. Clients she has worked with include the rapper Ice Prince, who won the 2013 BET Award for Best International Act: Africa, and the Nollywood and Hollywood movie star Hakeem Kae-Kazim. The energy and openness of the Nigerian music scene drew her home after years in London. “I kept coming back here on vacations,” she said. “And I would go home to London, and began to feel that the music lacked a certain vitality. I found that here. One day I just realized that this is where I belong.”

Chinedu Okeke, 29, was born in London and started British boarding school at age 7 (his Nigerian father is a legal advisor for the British government in Abuja). Okeke earned a British law degree and worked in New York, Beijing and Shanghai before moving to Lagos and starting his own branding and production company.

Young producers like Okeke and Omambala have joined the artist and gallery owner Nike Davies Okundaye as part of a small but growing group promoting Nigerian culture within Nigeria. Okundaye, who goes by her first name, Nike, was one of the wives of a polygamous villager when she was discovered by a curator from the American Museum of Natural History for her indigo-batik skills. She eventually left her husband, and has traveled to the United States many times over the years. In 2009, she opened the Nike Centre for Art and Culture on the edge of Lagos, near the sea. Nigerian art covers four stories of walls in the space. She says returnee Nigerians are more likely to collect, filling their offices with indigenous works. “Most Nigerians won’t buy art,” she said. “They’d rather have a religious icon in their home.”
That inclination against art and culture and toward tradition and religion challenges the young, Western-educated returnees, but doesn’t deter them all.

“I spent most of my life outside and it’s not the best place to live, for many reasons, but it’s never going to change if you are not willing to do your own part to create change,” Okeke said. “I don’t think politics is my thing but I’d rather be involved than complain and be part of the problem.” He conceded that the way business is done in Lagos, especially the closed circle of wealth and the official corruption, is discouraging.

Some of the more spectacular incidents of apparent corruption include the late military President Sani Abacha’s embezzlement, to the tune of more than $3 billion. He died in 1998, but only in March the United States froze more than $458 million in accounts linked to him. Earlier this year, the Nigerian government said it would audit its petroleum agency after the head of the central bank, who has since been fired, claimed that as much as $20 billion could be missing.

“It’s not as easy to come back as people think it is, and it’s not for everybody. I have had friends come back who haven’t been able to stick it out, there’s lots of stress and things don’t work the way they should,” Okeke said. He recently traveled around Europe and the United States trying to sell a documentary about a Nigerian music festival he produced. For him and some of the younger returnee generation, the lavish spectacles of the old guard are starting to chafe. “The power in Nigeria has remained within the same generation for 40 years. It’s not trickling down. Anybody younger who seems to have power is only there because a chief or a general, one of the set, is behind them. We need a lot of development in Nigeria, infrastructure. Nigeria should be feeding itself. But all the technical know-how and the funding needed is international. And those within the continent that have the money don’t understand how to develop it.”

Still, there are plenty of young people who guiltlessly enjoy the wealth. The chiefs and their wives and children are icons of conspicuous consumption. Nigerian peasants bend on one knee before them. Lagos’s billionaires and multimillionaires spend up to $50 million on long-range jets, and Nigeria has one of the fastest-growing markets for private aircraft in the world.

Their children’s wild pool parties, drinking binges and $250,000 weekend parties in London are local legend. Precious few from this set would think of walking the streets of Lagos; they cruise through in air-conditioned, locked luxury S.U.V.s, sometimes driven by officers wearing the elephant and red eagle insignia of the national police, who divert traffic if necessary to speed their bosses through snarled traffic. And if Lagos gets too hot, or they can’t find a store carrying the Prada bag they want, they fly to Dubai or Cape Town for the weekend.

Luxury companies like Ermenegildo Zegna, Hugo Boss and Porsche, noticing this trend, have been opening up shop in Lagos. Since 2008, the Nigerian luxury concept store Temple Muse has sold a variety of African and foreign fashion, home and gift brands, including Givenchy, Emilio Pucci, Saint Laurent, Baccarat and Assouline. The Nigerian designer Reni Folawiyo is soon opening a concept store called Alara, designed by the London-based architect David Adjaye, in a three-story red-pigmented building that encloses a series of suspended platforms and staircases. Alara will showcase Nigerian designers as well as European houses.

“Lagos has always been an important hub in Africa and the world – but it is now emerging as one of the world’s foremost metropolitan cities,” Adjaye wrote in an email. “The fact that it can sustain a project like Alara, and others like it, is evidence of its growing wealth, recently improved infrastructure and sense of confidence. We are very much looking forward to the project completing and have been doing some feasibility work on other sites in the city. My hope is that we will continue to work there for years to come.” Indigenous fashion designers are attracting the same crowd. The growing fashion sector, like Nollywood, is indicative of a nation on the cusp of wider prosperity, explains Omoyemi Akerele, the founder of Style House Files, which organizes Lagos Fashion & Design Week. “Retail is key here,” she said. “We need to create opportunities for people to shop. People have nothing. People are returning here, because they see opportunities.”

The designer Deola Sagoe has been working in Lagos for more than 20 years. Sagoe, dressed in a royal blue silk wrap blouse and black velvet leggings with a giant aquamarine on one hand, met me in her store, a two-story sleek glass building located in bustling Victoria Island. Even though the district is one of the wealthier areas, many of the streets are rutted and the sidewalks cracked – if they are there at all. She consults with clients in a room with French velvet-upholstered chairs, and then leads them back into her studio, with walls of fabric she designs and has handmade in Nigerian villages on 11th-century looms. The traditional fabrics share wall space with newer pieces she designs, like deep blue indigo-dyed silks, that she uses to create garments with an Afro-Asian-Italian aesthetic.

Sagoe, the daughter of a major Nigerian industrialist, grew up traveling frequently to Italy and Japan and went to college in the United States. She took up fashion against the wishes of her father, who – like all Nigerian parents, she said – wanted his children to go into business and make money. Until quite recently, she noted, fashion was looked down upon as a career in her set. Wealthy Nigerian women only went to Nigerian designers for traditional gowns and headdresses needed for formal affairs.

Sagoe – and other Nigerian designers who’ve come after her – are changing that culture. “People used to go to Paris and buy, but not buy it here,” Sagoe said. “If they did, they would haggle about the price, because there wasn’t a tradition of fashion, but of tailors.” She employs hand-weavers and dyers in remote villages, but she can’t produce clothes on a larger scale inside Nigeria, because the substandard power grid can’t support factories. Nonetheless, she brought her three daughters into the business, and is expanding. “Africa is my foundation,” she said. “Nigerians are expressive and proud. Looking good is good business.”

The designer Amaka Osakwe, 28, caught the attention of the judges of the inaugural LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize this year with her sleek silhouettes that merge traditional symbols and craftsmanship with modern looks. “Each piece has a meaning,” she wrote in an email about her line, called Maki Oh, which placed in the competition’s semifinals. “Traditionally, the colors, embellishments, motifs, etc. of garments were used to pass messages. For example, a piece of Adire cloth with the traditional Adire motif called ‘Mat’ (which features hand-drawn lines which to the untrained eye may resemble a checkered pattern) was often presented as a wedding gift.” The pattern, she continued, symbolized the hope “that the couple may be blessed with children shortly after they lay on a mat/bed in their home. This notion of passing messages through garments is what we consider when we decide the length of a skirt, the motif, the color of an embellishment. This is why research is key.”
Maki Oh, Deola Sagoe and Folake Folarin-Coker, the designer behind Nigeria’s thrivingTiffany Amber brand, exist to serve the wives, daughters and girlfriends of the business titans and wealthy returnees like the 49-year-old television talk-show host Mo Abudu, a former oil company human resources executive now known as the “Oprah of Africa.” Abudu, who was born in London and educated in Britain, moved to Lagos a few years after she got married. She started her talk show in 2006, and has interviewed the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, but she’s chiefly an unabashed Africa-promoter. She recently launched a pan-African television network, EbonyLife TV.

When we met for lunch, Abudu, who calls herself an Afro-politan media entrepreneur, was accessorized in Saint Laurent platforms and a Birkin bag.

Abudu said she’s living in Lagos because “it’s Africa’s time” now. “Westerners are more interested in war, genocide, rape and H.I.V.,” she said. “You would think if you listened to Western media that every other person in Africa has H.I.V. For me, that’s boring. And there’s a business angle. African brands must recognize that if you want to be global, your environment must be considered with respect.

“Everything in Africa is so virgin right now. There is so much interest. Big media are all putting together their Africa strategy. We love American movies, but want to see our stories. Their approach to Africa is like, we want to go to the moon. Don’t make us look shallow and all about the money. There’s a lot of hard work going on.”

Abudu and other Nigerian returnees know their country’s reputation isn’t getting any better. Polio remains endemic in the northern states, where several vaccination workers were killed in attacks last February that were thought to have been carried out by the extremist sect Boko Haram. The group, whose name means “Western education is forbidden,” also claimed responsibility for a bus station bombing that killed dozens last week in the capital city of Abuja, and is suspected in the kidnapping of about 200 schoolgirls from a northeastern town a day later.

“This country has the biggest G.D.P. in Africa,” one oil industry expat said at the Lagos Yacht Club, a hangout where British and Nigerian sailors sip gin and tonics. “But no 24-hour power. Where is it? The scale and quantity of what has happened here is tragic. The people are fundamentally peaceful. They just want the basics – water and power.”
One young investment banker educated in the United States who had worked on Wall Street traded in his suit for the traditional linen gown and trousers, and now works in his family’s investment firm in Lagos. He pointed out that some of Nigeria’s problems stem from the newness and insecurity of the private fortunes. “This level of wealth is a generation deep,” he said. “You have a Lamborghini. Where do you drive it? The roads are terrible. You take it out on Sundays and carefully drive it to a hotel for lunch, then bring it home.”

The culture of philanthropy is growing among Nigerians and the great chiefs do return some of their fortunes to the people. Banker Balogun donated one of the largest pediatric hospitals in Africa to the medical school of the Universtiy of Ibadan. Africa’s wealthiest businessman, the billionaire cement mogul Aliko Dangote, has donated significant sums to programs to build Nigerian small businesses, and he gave millions to help Nigerian flood victims.

I asked Balogun whether returning elites might portend improvements in Nigerian infrastructure and social welfare. He said the country’s problems stem from a postcolonial backlash against foreign involvement.

“I’m 80, so I can give you my views without fear,” he said. “The country needs a thorough transformation. After independence, we used to think the best thing was to get Nigerians into the commanding heights. We started with what I call a morbid dislike for foreign acquisition of what we believed was our own enterprise. It would be good if we could move away from that and allow highly reputed, successful business entrepreneurs to partner with us in developing the whole place.”

Chief Sonny Iwedike Odogwu invited me in for an audience at his labyrinthine gated palace with hand-tooled Moroccan filigree ceilings, on the palm-lined but rutted Queen’s Drive. On the day we pulled up to the guard house, a water main was broken on the street, and we splashed through a foot of muddy water as we pulled up. Like Balogun, Odogwu is also in his 80s, and made his fortune as the oil and gas industry developed. He founded one of the first Nigerian insurance brokerages (Dyson & Diket), and insured the oil sector’s assets. On the day we met, he wore a spotless, starched white linen robe with gold threads, and was perched on a long couch in one of the grand sitting rooms in his mansion (a room in the basement seats 700), considering the pleas of a pair of women from the fashion council, who were proposing that he finance a Brazilian-Nigerian fashion expo they wanted to attend.

Odogwu, like many of the old guard, is a very religious man. He has donated millions to the Catholic Church and is particularly proud of photographs of him and his wife in the Vatican earlier this year, renewing their marriage vows in front of Pope Francis. He believes they are the first African couple to have the Pope officiate at a marriage renewal ceremony.

I asked him whether he thought the vast fortunes he and his friends control would or should trickle down to develop Nigeria. Odogwu suggested that religion – not politics – was the answer to problems with Nigeria’s wealth distribution issues. “There are lots of religious organizations here,” he said. “They do a lot and we give them a lot of money. Instead of telling people what they don’t have, they help them out of their frustration, and make them believe that their way of life is better than in the west.” Spiritual balm for the masses, he said, was one good reason for him and his fellow elites to pile the collection plate high on Sundays.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/lagos-nigeria-fashion-deola-sagoe-alara-temple-muse/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

TIME MAGAZINE NAMES OKONJO-IWEALA ONE OF THE WORLD’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE


Ten years after its European edition honoured her as one of world’s “Heroes”, TIME magazine has named the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to the 2014 TIME 100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The Minister is part of the “Leaders” category of the respected list, along with Chinese President Xi Jinping; US Secretary of State, John Kerry; Russian President Vladmir Putin; Iranian President Hassan Rouhani; Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and others. Alhaji Alike Dangote; former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton; Chair of the US Federal Reserve Board, Janet Yellen and German ChancellorAngela Merkel were among those honoured in other categories of the award.

In an accompanying profile, respected global activist and founder of ONE campaign, Bono paid tribute to the Minister’s contribution to achieving the historic debt deal with the Paris Club and the fight against corruption. He also lauded her for her work as Finance Minister, stating that “she’s got one of the toughest jobs on the planet”.
Bono said of NOI: “Humour and joy spill out of her. She is “fiercely intelligent; everyone wants her to work with them. I couldn’t be prouder to work for her.”
In her reaction, Dr Okonjo-Iweala expressed her delight and humility at the honour, following so soon after the Rockefeller Leadership Award which she got recently.

“I am grateful to God for his blessings and I appreciate the privilege and honour of working for my country. I am thankful to my teams that worked hard to help me achieve. I appreciate the support and prayers of millions of Nigerians and friends around the world. This is vastly encouraging”.

The full list and related tributes appear in the May 5 issue of TIME, available on newsstands and tablets on Friday, April 25, and now at time.com/time100.

Now in its 11th year, the list recognizes the activism, innovation and achievement of the world’s most influential individuals.
By Paul C Nwabuikwu

First built in Nigeria Nissan Patrol rolls off production line


Nissan has become the first major manufacturer to build a car in Nigeria in response to the Federal Government’s new Automotive Policy

According to a statement from Stallion Motors, Nissan representatives in Nigeria, the inaugural vehicle, a black Nissan Patrol, rolled off the production line at the Lagos assembly plant, marking a key milestone in the company’s continued wave of expansion into the high-growth markets.

In addition to the Patrol, Nissan also plans to produce the Almera and NP300, starting in early May and followed by mass production in August. With these three models, Nissan aims to be a significant player in the Nigerian automotive sector.

Nissan is targeting significant growth in Africa as the company builds momentum towards achieving its Power 88 goals, a commitment to reach 8% profitability by the end of fiscal year 2016.

Elsewhere in the world as part of the high-growth markets strategy, plants have been opened in Mexico and Brazil with projects underway in Indonesia, Thailand and China. Last year Nissan announced it will be the first manufacturer to build cars in Myanmar, after the opening up of the economy in the south-east Asian country.

The first “built in Nigeria for Nigerians” Nissan Patrol follows the signing last year of a Memorandum of Understanding for vehicle assembly in Lagos between the Renault-Nissan Alliance and West African conglomerate Stallion Group.

Since then, preparing for production in Nigeria to global production standards has been achieved at a rapid pace, setting a new benchmark in responsiveness and organisational agility.

By Theodore Opara

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/04/first-built-nigeria-nissan-patrol-rolls-production-line/