Nigerian Militants MEND (Movement for the emancipation of the Niger Delta) have reiterated that foreign oil companies should leave the Niger Delta of Nigeria.
MEND warned in an email that companies still operating in the Delta "namely Agip, Total, Shell and and Exxon Mobil (XOM) to leave while there is still time because within the next 72 hours" it may launch new attacks.
The MEND spokesman in the email also "warns the investors to the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline project that unless the Niger Delta root issue have been addressed and resolved, and money put into the project will go down the drain."
"We will ensure that it faces the same fate other pipelines are facing today"
Jose Mourinho arrived Lagos, Nigeria via KLM airlines at 7:30pm last night. As part of the welcoming procedure for one of the world's most popular football coaches who has won major titles with FC Porto, Chelsea and currently Inter-Milan, Jose Mourinho was scheduled to attend a dinner in his honour at the Eko hotel in Lagos before retiring to the Federal Palace Hotel.
Jose Mourinho arrived Ilorin today to coach a team made up of pupils of the Kwara Football Academy (KFA) playing a friendly against Belgium's Royal Antwerp FC juniour team.
The CEO of Premium Sports Management, Nkechi Obi added that the international friendly between KFA and Royal Antwerp FC will serve as an opportunity for KFA to test their skills.
"They are playing on home turf in front of their number one fan, Governor Bukola Saraki. The entire country will be behind them and international scouts will watch them so the opportunity beckons the boys to show the stuff they are made of. Above all, the "Special One", Mourinho will provide the requisite verve and charisma to spur them on," she said.
Inter Milan coach Jose Mourinho comes to Nigeria to visit the The Kwara Football Academy (KFA) in north-central Nigeria. Tickets for the match between a KFA selected team versus Belgium's Royal Antwerp FC junior team have gone on sale for N1,000,N1,2000, and N3,000.
The match will be played on Saturday, July 4th. Jose Mourinho will be on the KFA bench acting as technical adviser for the Kwara Football Academy team.
Tickets are available at Ilorin branches of Intercontinental Bank, GTBank and Zenith Bank.
Nollywood Babylon is a gritty documentary that sheds light on Nigerian cinema and shows how it's fast becoming one of the biggest movie industries in the world. The documentary recently had the privilege of being screened at this years Sundance Film festival.
New York Times today released a rather interesting review of the movie:
"While Americans sweat the fate of independent film at places like Sundance or South by Southwest, movie-mad Nigerians flock to the outdoor electronic markets of Lagos to buy the latest offerings from Nollywood.
Inaugurated in 1992 with “Living in Bondage,” an exploitation number about witchcraft and social climbing distributed on VHS, the contemporary Nigerian film industry is one of the world’s largest, according to “Nollywood Babylon,” a documentary by Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal.
The film profiles the explosive success of this truly populist cinema. The filmmakers provide a cursory survey of the evolution of Nigerian cinema — from colonial origins and decline during the economic hardships of the 1970s and ’80s to its resurrection as a D.I.Y. video phenomenon — before focusing on the contemporary scene.
We follow Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, a 37-year-old director at work on his 157th feature (take that, Fassbinder!) and learn of the stories and themes, characteristic of Nollywood movies, that propel his success: cautionary tales, rags-to-riches narratives, broad comedies and dramatic thrillers full of sex, money, religion and violence.
The documentary concludes with a provocative, if shallow, examination of the impact of evangelical Christianity on Nigerian movies. The exploitation and wish-fulfillment ethos of Nollywood, Mr. Addelman and Mr. Mallal also imply, has a narcotic function on the culture, arresting its development from “tradition to modernity.”
Such questions call for a deeper, more rigorous treatment than they are given here, though, for all its limitations, “Nollywood Babylon” serves as an intriguing primer."
