Nollywood - Thousands of fans gather to watch 'new film, Ibu in Sierra-Leone' at the Greenwich Odeon in London

John Okafor aka Mr Ibu on the red carpet

I checked my phone on Friday evening and saw that I was indeed going to attend a Nollywood Movie Premier afterall. Not an exciting thought as I had been working all day.

IN PICTURES:Red carpet event at the London movie premier of IBU IN SIERRA-LEONE

The movie premier of Ibu in Sierra-Leone took place on Friday 26th October 2013 at the Odeon in Greenwich, London. Here are all the wonderful pictures:

Interview with Joyce Dominic: CEO of Joyce Beauty World and Herbal Extracts

ISM: Hello and welcome to iShine Magazine. Please, tell us your name and what you do?

JD: My name is Joyce Dominic, I am the CEO of Joyce Beauty World and Joyce Herbal. My company Specializes in skincare and herbal cosmetic products. Our products are 100%

Pretty London Hip Hop Artist releases new tracks - Listen to Sweet Ambitious here

Sweet Ambitious

Up and coming London hip hop singer Sweet Ambitious burst onto the music scene with these cool tracks. The daughter of a popular London artist called Ruth Bircham.

Women4Africa Business Leadership Summit 2013

Chief Host and Founder, Africa4Women Summit

LONDON, UK - The Annual W4A, Business and Leadership Summit is here again! This year's event titled, Repositioning your ‘ Brand’ for Global Visibility in 2014 will take place on Friday the 15th of November 2013 from 9am till 4pm at NH Harrington Hotel, 5-25 Harrington Gardens, Kensington, London SW7 4JW.

Whitney Houston comes alive again!

Wax sculpture of Whitney Houston courtesy of Madam Tussauds

In celebration of Whitney Houston’s life and legacy, Madame Tussauds recently unveiled four wax figures of the star immortalizing her at memorable moments in her career at Madame Tussauds in the US.

What is kidney disease? 10 Ways to prevent kidney failure

Kidney disease often creeps on patients, developing slowly overtime without symptoms or it may be discovered after a bout of dehydration. Here are ten ways to keep your beans in tip top condition:

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge prepare for Prince George's christening today

Proud parents- the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge prepare for Prince George's christening
Photo: Reuters

ENGLAND - Prince William and Princess Catherine will be baptising their first son, baby George today. The Prince will be christened at the Chapel Royal in St James' Palace with water from the

Doreen Lawrence, mother of Steven Lawrence will join House of Lords as Labour peer today

Doreen Lawrence

LONDON, UK - Doreen will be taking her seat at  the House of Lords today. The mother of the murdered London teenager Stephen Lawrence will be made a Labour peer and take the title of Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon.

Doreen Lawrence has led a long campaign to find out what happened to her son, who was killed in a racially aggravated attack in 1993. Two men were eventually convicted of his murder in 2011.

Eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence was stabbed by a gang of white youths as he waited for a bus in south London. An inquiry following the murder led the Metropolitan Police to be accused of institutional racism and found failings in how the force had investigated the crime.

There are 830 Lords who sit in the House of Lords and two of them are Afro-Carribean.

Who is sinking migrant boats? Controversy as 20,000 Africans drown off Italian coast

Story One: On October 4^th, a boat capsized in the area killing 300 people including hundreds of children.

The boat - which set sail from the Libyan port of Misrata ran into difficulty close to the coast of Italy. Some of those on board then reportedly set fire to a piece of material to try to attract the attention

New vaccine could stop 100m cases of malaria a year

Could this be the time for celebration? A new malaria vaccination has been  made by British pharmaceutial company, GlaxoSmithKline. The jab has the potential to prevent up to 100m cases of the malaria disease each year and save 200,000 lives.

Nigeria's Folorunsho Alakija overtakes Oprah Winfrey as the world's riches black woman

Nigerian billionaire unseats TV queen as the richest black woman in the world with $7.3b oil fortune.
Mother-of-four, Folorunsho Alakija, 62, started her career as a secretary in a bank then studied fashion and launched a label but her big break was oil. In 1993, her company, Famfa Oil, was

300 Africans feared dead in Italy boat sinking

The bodies of the victims were lined up at Lampedusa dockside

 

Lampedusa,I TALY: At least 300 African migrants have died and many more are missing after a boat carrying them to Europe sank off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa.

A total of 305 bodies have been recovered and more have been found inside the wreck, coast guards say.

Passengers reportedly threw themselves into the sea when a fire broke out on board. More than 150 of the migrants have been rescued.

Most of those on board were from Eritrea and Somalia, said the UN.

The boat was believed to have been carrying up to 500 people at the time and some 200 of them are unaccounted for.

So far this year, over 30,000 have made the crossing and thousands have died.

Over the years there have been numerous disasters involving migrants off Lampedusa, but seldom on anything like this scale. The island's mayor wept as she took in the scene on the harbour wall.

Furious demands are being made for an end to the dangerous trafficking of people across the Mediterranean. But it is hard to see how the flow could be curbed, with so many people so desperate for a chance to make a new life in Europe, and traffickers in so many ports ready to take their money.

Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said the ship had come from Misrata in Libya and began taking on water when its motor stopped working.

It is thought that some of those on board set fire to a piece of material to try to attract the attention of passing ships, only to have the fire spread to the rest of the boat.

Survivors said that in order to escape the fire, "the migrants moved, all of them, to one side of the boat which capsized".

Only six of about 100 women on board survived, adding that most of the migrants were unable to swim. Hunderds of children were also said to have drowned.
 

BBC News  contributed to this report.

 

The vessel reportedly capsized after a fire on board

 

There are believed to have been around 500 people on board the vessel 

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Five reasons why so many planes crash in Nigeria?

Aircrash near Lagos airport. MAY THE SOULS OF THE DEAD REST IN PEACE -  sky.com

I met two separate families who had recently returned to England from Nigeria. The first family had travelled with four children ranging in age from 6 to 16, while the second family included a mother and male twins aged 12. I met up with them on different occasions, they had both travelled to different parts of the country but their story was the similar.

The Onuohas had landed in Lagos on a plane from London and proceeded to hire a mini bus that took the family of six by road to Abuja, then on to Onitsha. I was told by members of this family that the roads were good and relatively safe. Somewhere near Ondo town, however, the bus driver was told to turn off the road by local people because there were armed robbers on the road ahead. However, they arrived at Onitsha safely with no further mishap.

The Anis too had a relatively happy trip when they travelled by road from Lagos to Ilorin to visit relatives.

This brings me to the conclusion that travelling by road in Nigerian is not as dangerous as travelling by air.

Some believe otherwise and many people prefer to travel by air because they say it is safer.

Safer? Not in Nigeria…but faster maybe, if you travel in a well maintained plane flown by a competent pilot.

So why are there so many crashes in the country famed to be the giant of Africa? Here are some of the reasons I have discovered:

1. The planes are old and disused rejects from countries like Europe, India and China.
2. The aerospace engineers are not well qualified. If they are trained in Nigeria, they study the theorectical aspects of maintaining and flying a plane and hardly any practical work. Plus, Nigeria does not have adequate aeroplane manufacturers and world class service engineers. So, most engineers have no idea of how to manufacture parts or put them together.
3. Space parts may have to be ordered and in most cases are no longer manufactured because the planes are out-dated. Imagine looking for the spare parts of a 1960s Citroen car…
4. The engineers trained abroad, therefore, have no parts to replace old ones, so, they watch, pray and hope no one dies if the plane pack up.
5. Can That part of Lagos be likned to the Bermuda Trainagle Is there aa forece in the are pulling planes down? Or as one of the children I coach said, is it a case of magic?

Have you seen Nigeria’s largest airport recently?

The airport is old and frozen in the 1950s. I was in the Murtala Mohammed airport last year, and the airport lobby looked like somewhere out of the last century. Only one plane can land at a time. So, you can never get lost or confused about where to go or what plane to board.  There were no signs for directions, no escalators, no lifts, no phone booths; no lights in some section of the hallway, no air conditioning even the tiles of the floor were missing in some places. When you finally get to the immigration points, all you will see are a few old tables and a mad queue to get passports checked. There was no public announcement sysytem just people shouting all over the place. To get from one place to another you have to ask other people or just follow the crowd.

When you finally get past this immigration point, you will have to beg other experienced travellers for money to ‘hire’ a trolley just like to you do at Sainsbury’s. You look around and see this dingy place called an airport. It is worse than an abandoned outpost in the middle of a desert. Dingy lights, dingy tables, dingy immigration officers in funny dingy uniforms. When you finally get your baggage on to the trolley and head for the door, you will be stopped by another set of immigration officers who ‘beg’ you for money or something. The whole place is so tiny when you compare it to Heathrow or Gatwick Airport yet the whole of UK is only a third of Nigeria. I was almost waiting for the electricity to fail.

Nigerians often blame slavery, colonisation, and corruption and so on for this messed called Nigeria but let’s just leave these ills aside for once. I know they have contributed to the way things are in Nigeria, but at 53, is it not time for Nigerians to sing another tune.

 

How to keep safe...

Travel on well serviced and maintained planes.

• Ask to see authentic credentials and service documents of the pilots and of the aircraft. 
• Is the plane new and shiny? It's probably newly bought and still in good shape.
• Look around the aircraft. Does it look and smell alright? If not, get off.
• What about theplane's engine, does it sound loud and jerky or sqeeky? If it does run for your life.

A solution that can safe lives

How about our so called billionaires building our airports and controlling them? The government does not have to build everything for the country. A good example of this type of privatisation is education. Wealthy Nigerian can do the same with airports, hospitals, roads, factories and so on. If all wealthy Nigerians were invited to make a difference and given a chance, maybe Nigeria will gradually become a better place. There would also be more transparency and accountability in service. And, these philanthropists can create better airports with new well serviced planes and well trained pilots, engineer and technicians.  

What do you think?

 

 

Nigerian News: 15 dead after passenger plane crashes near Lagos airport

Bystanders at the scene of a plane crash in Lagos on Thursday.
 

Fifteen people were killed Thursday when a passenger plane crashed near an airport in Nigeria's largest city, authorities said.

The Nigeria National Emergency Management Agency said that the aircraft crashed after taking off from Lagos. It had been bound for the city of Akure, about 170 miles away.

"The plane couldn't lift properly so it just came down," Aviation Ministry spokesman Joe Obi told the agency.

Witness Henrie Eduozor told NBC News he was on his way to the airport in Lagos when he saw smoke rising from a nearby field. He said people ran toward the scene screaming “There’s been a crash!”

Eduozo saw three bodies being removed from the wreckage.

Airports Authority general manager Yakubu Dati told a news conference the Embraer 120 plane with 20 passengers on board, inclusive of crew, came down 9.32 a.m. local time (4:32 a.m. ET).

"Five people survived," he added. "We have recovered the black box."

Several local radio stations and Channels TV reported that it was carrying a family and the body of former governor of Ondo state Olusegun Agagu to his funeral.

Air crashes are relatively common in Nigeria, which despite having Africa's second-biggest economy has a poor safety record.

Murtala Muhammed International Airport was the scene of a June 2012 crash that killed 163 people.

An NBC and Reuters report.

Pictures taken from the scene of the crash: Sky.com