Posted on 09/05/2010 7:16:53 AM PDT by Oakeshott
LAGOS, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Nigeria is building a multi-billion dollar free trade zone with Chinese investors on the edge of its commercial capital Lagos to try to develop a local manufacturing base and help reduce its import dependence.
The $5 billion first phase of the Lekki Free Zone, a 3,000 hectare site on the eastern fringe of the city, is 60 percent held by Chinese investors and 40 percent by the Lagos state government, the deputy head of the project told Reuters. ...........
The West African head of private equity firm Actis estimated earlier this year that some 10 million people had moved from low income towards the middle income bracket in Nigeria in the past five years alone
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Brace for new wave of Chinese-Nigerian scams?
This is good! The experience will prepare then for similar projects in Chicago. One must remember it would be illegal for a us citizen to do this in reality. They have no competition in African corruption.
Wow. If free trade does for China what it did for us, this is a good deal. China may have to borrow money from US and have a jobless recession.
Guys.
The thing about stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. I posted an article about China and Africa - and in true form, your responses were full of the usual stereotypes.
Africa has a middle class of 300 million people, the Chinese understand that, Americans don’t. 10 million people moved from low income status to middle class status during the last five years in Nigeria alone. Chinese understand that, Americans don’t.
Labour costs are rising in China and Lagos is much closer to European markets than Shanghai. Chinese understand that, Americans don’t.
I work in a top four consulting company in Africa. I have seen American companies losing business to Indian, Chinese, Brazilian and South African companies simply because they still stick to the outdated stereotypes of Africa.
Now this is not to say that Africa does not have problems. It does, but unless you think all Africans are idiots (which some of you might), steps are being taken to solve these problems.
Western conservatives in general, tend to be very ignorant about Africa - and proud of that ignorance.
In closing, China will not colonise Africa.
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Stereoytpes are unfortunate but decades of notorious documented bad behavior will not help.
Adding China's contempt for profit over quality and contempt of IP laws to Nigeria's being a criminal enterprise in the entirety, known to all owners of email addresses, is a horrifying thought.
Now, we can all order little digital picture frames loaded with spyware and trojans, and never even get the merchandise.
What would you have the US do? Open up a free trade zone locate some factories there and lose some more jobs. Sorry been there, done that. And that’s not an African stereotype.
If the American economy is to grow, America has to do business in Africa (and Nigeria).
It is as simple as that.
You can call Nigerians all the names under the sun, you can tar every single one of them with the same brush. The fact remains that America desperately needs Nigeria (Nigeria is the fourth largest exporter of crude to America).
This is no longer 1948, when America was unrivalled economically.
We have competition. If we must only do business with angels, we miss out.
All I want is for them to clean up their act. There is a lot more there than oil; They have a lot of mineral wealth besides oil. People in several fields are simply afraid to do business with them because of bad experiences. I do not expect everyone to play by our rules, but there have to be SOME rules, somewhere.
So all Nigerians are dishonest and all Nigerian businesses do not play by the rules?
Let me tell you a story. When the GSM licences were auctioned in Nigeria, Vodacom famously did not participate. The CEO claimed “that he did not want to do business with people smarter than him”.
What happened? South African based MTN got a licence and has made a killing.Vodacom sacked that CEO and has been (unsuccessfully) trying to penetrate the Nigerian market for the greater part of the last decade.
If you cannot correctly balance risk and opportunity, you shouldn’t be in business.
Perhaps you are correct, Europe never colonized them either...not completely untrue if you assume incompleteness. Step out of the fish bowl and add the FCPA and, as a US Citizen,try to compete with the Chinese Africa.
Bon chance
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