Thursday, March 2, 2017

Video - Should Nigeria's president resign?



President Muhammadu Buhari flew to London in mid-January to be treated for an undisclosed medical condition.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is temporarily leading the country.

But opposition leaders say Buhari has been out of the country for too long and he should resign.

So what will this mean for Nigeria and the region?

Video - Discussion on underage marriage and polygamy ongoing in Nigeria




In Nigeria, a senior Muslim cleric and former central bank governor has suggested Islamic marriage reforms. Muhammadu Sanusi has announced that men shouldn't take more than one wife if they can't afford to look after multiple spouses. His controversial comments come amid an ongoing debate on polygamy in Nigeria. Sophia Adengo has this story.

Nigerian engineer forced to take written test at New York airport

A Nigerian software engineer claims he was handed a written test by a US border officer at New York's JFK airport to prove his tech credentials, and Filipinos on social media criticise a proposed death penalty bill.

A software engineer from Lagos, Nigeria, is claiming that he was made to sit a written test by US airport immigration officers because they weren't convinced he was telling the truth about his skills.

According to social networking site LinkedIn, Celestine Omin, 28, landed in New York's JFK airport last Sunday after a 24-hour flight from Nigeria.

Mr Omin is employed by Andela, a tech start-up with offices in New York, Lagos, Nairobi and San Francisco.

The firm says it recruits "the most talented developers on the African continent" and connects them with tech employers in the US for potential job vacancies. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg visited Andela's office in Lagos last year.

Mr Omin had reportedly been granted a short-term visa to work with First Access, a financial technology company in New York's Manhattan district.

After being asked a series of questions by a US Customs and Border Protection officer, he was taken into a room for further checks.

"Your visa says you are a software engineer. Is that correct?" an officer is reported to have asked Mr Omin.

He says he was then given a piece of paper and a pen and told to answer these two questions to prove he is actually a software engineer:

"Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced."

"What is an abstract class, and why do you need it?"

Mr Omin told LinkedIn it seemed to him the questions had been "Googled" by "someone with no technical background".

He said later on Twitter that he was "too tired to even think", and told the officer they could "talk about other computer science concepts".

After he handed back his answers, he was told by the officer that they were wrong. He said he presumed he was required to provide "the Wikipedia definition" for the questions.

However, he was even more surprised a little later when the officer told him he was "free to go".

"Look, I am going to let you go, but you don't look convincing to me," said the officer, according to Mr Omin.

"I didn't say anything back. I just walked out."

He later found out that border protection officers had phoned Andela to verify his story.

A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told the BBC: "US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers strive to treat all people arriving in the country with dignity and respect.

"While we are not at liberty to discuss individual cases due to the Privacy Act, our CBP officers enforce not only immigration and customs laws, but also more than 400 laws for 40 other agencies and have stopped thousands of violators of US law."

Nigeria is not one of the seven countries included in US President Donald Trump's temporary immigration pause. However, the African country has been struggling with the threat of terrorism in recent times, in particular from the militant Islamist group Boko Haram.

Mr Trump has repeatedly called for "strong borders" and "extreme vetting" since taking office on 20 January.

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Video - Former Nigerian leader Obasanjo condemns South Africans attacking Nigerians




Nigerians have been condemning the violence against foreigners in South Africa. Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has added his voice to the criticism. CGTN's Deji Badmus sat down with the former leader, and filed this report.

97 Nigerians deported from South Africa

While the Nigerian government criticises South Africa’s handling of recent xenophobic attacks on Nigerians, the South African Government has deported 97 Nigerians for committing various offences in the country.

The property of several Nigerians and other sub-Saharan Africans have been destroyed across South Africa in xenophobic attacks that have been condemned by various governments.

While asking its citizens to stop the attacks, the South African government has also blamed illegal immigrants from Nigeria and other countries, as well immigrants who commit crime for the attacks. The government has thus decided to clamp down on such immigrants.

The 97 deported Nigerians landed at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos on Monday night in a chartered aircraft with the registration number GBB710 from Johannesburg.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that they were made up of 95 males and two females.

Joseph Alabi, the spokesperson of the Lagos Airport Police Command, confirmed the development.

An immigration source told NAN on condition of anonymity that six of the deportees were returned to the country for drug offences while 10 were arrested and deported for other criminal offences .

The others were said to have committed immigration offences in the Southern African country.

All the deportees were profiled by officials of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) while those deported for drug related offences were handed over to the Police for further investigation.

The Federal Government had also on Monday evacuated 41 Nigerian girls who were trafficked to Mali for sex and labour exploitation.

Six of the suspected human traffickers were also apprehended and brought back to the country for prosecution.