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News FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE NEWS: CELEBRATING NIGERIA @ 50 ON 1, 3 & 9, OCTOBER 2010
Dinner event 6.30 to 9.00pm – £40 per person We have received messages of support from the Nigerian Presidency, His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, Prime Minister David Cameron MP, Boris Johnson Mayor of London and the Nigerian High Commission UK A Limited Edition Commemorative Souvenir Brochure featuring the Great, the Good and Positive of Nigeria will be published and circulated worldwide. 3rd October 2010, Church Service at Stockwell Baptist Church, 276 South Lambeth Road, London SW8 1UU, from 11.00 am to 1.00pm. 9 October 2010 Gala Dinner and Awards – By invitation only. We are using this medium to call on Nigerians to cultivate a culture of commitment, dedication and patriotism to move our great nation forward in a positive light. Nigerians and those interested in her development are encouraged to recognise and celebrate the great, good and positive Nigerians who have demonstrated excellence in their various callings, worldwide and be inspired to continue the good work for the benefit of our Great nation. Since independence, Nigeria has experienced numerous achievements in the fields of Academia, Arts and Culture, Film and Music, Commerce and Trade, IT, Sports, Global Peace keeping etc.   President Jonathan Arrives Canada For G-20 Summit – PM News 24/06/2010  Also attending the summit is the Chair of the African Union and President of the Republic of Malawi Bhingu wa Mutharika are scheduled to attend the G20 Business Leaders: Partnering with Africa’s Dynamic Markets, to be held at the Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre Hotel in Toronto. President Jacob Zuma of the Republic of South Africa is tentatively scheduled to attend.African Union Commission Chair Jean Ping, former Prime Minister of Canada Joe Clark, leaders from the World Bank, European Business Council for Africa and the Mediterranean, Business Unity South Africa, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Nigerian Economic Summit Group, and the U.S. and Canadian private sectors will also be in attendance. “Africa is rapidly emerging as a major destination for investment and powerful trading partner for countries around the world,” said CCAfrica President and CEO Lucien Bradet. “Hosting this event in Toronto on the eve of the G20 will ensure the private sector’s role in Africa’s development is heard by the G20 leaders.” “In the recent past, Africa has become a continent that attracts considerable investments—close to $144 billion—and trade with the developed world is now a multiple of this number,” said CCA President and CEO Stephen Hayes. The conference will focus on how business leaders from the G20 countries have a unique opportunity to partner with Africa in a way that helps grow economies both in African and in the G20 nations; and brings together senior North American, European, Asian and African private sector and government officials with a vested interest in investment and growth on the continent. The collaboration between government and the private sector will be explored, throughout various sessions. It will also convene business leaders focused on ensuring the private sector’s voice at the G20 Summit is heard. Gen. Agwai Awarded International Peace And Security Award Wednesday, 23 June 2010  Gen. Agwai, who is also former Nigerian Chief of Defence Staff and Force Commander of UNAMID, the joint UN-AU force in Darfur, received the award in recognition of his distinguished military career and dedication to the promotion of peace and security in Africa. Accepting the award, Gen. Agwai said, “I am proud to say that my country, Nigeria, rose to the challenges posed to the international community by Africa-wide security problems, leading me to play a greater role in trying to secure peace on the continent than I ever imagined I would when I began my career 40 years ago.” He went on to say, “Good governance is still a challenge in most African countries. We must appreciate that a lot of progress has been made in this regard, but there are democratic structures that still need to be strengthened. Lack of free and fair elections and corruption are challenges that could truncate democracy and erode the gains we have made in the march towards good governance and democracy in Africa. Peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict but must also be based on the rights and dignity of every citizen of Africa. A just peace does not only include respect for civil and political rights but also economic security and freedom from want, which can only be guaranteed by good governance. In his acceptance speech Gen. Agwai also paid tribute to officers and soldiers of the Nigerian Armed Forces, saying, "I deployed thousands of them to distant lands in the service of peace and I am immensely proud of how they conducted themselves....Some of them paid the supreme sacrifice for the sake of peace and security in Africa. Their sacrifices will never be forgotten." Okonedo: OBE cherry on the cake – Mirror.co.uk 12/06/2010  The star, who was recently seen on TV screens portraying Winnie Mandela, said her recognition was "way beyond anything I would have imagined for myself". She said: "I have tried where possible to choose interesting, diverse and sometimes experimental work." She continued: "For instance, next week I will be performing in Elephant and Castle shopping centre as part of the Royal Court's Rough Cuts season. "To be recognised for that is way beyond anything I would have imagined for myself. "I am privileged to be doing the kind of drama that I do and to be honoured for it is the cherry on the cake." The London-based actress comes from humble beginnings and was brought up by her Jewish pilates instructor mother, Joan. The star, who has a daughter named Aoife, was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar in 2005 for her role in Hotel Rwanda, in which she played the wife of a hotel owner who helps desperate people flee genocide. She was nominated for two TV Baftas this year, for her roles in Mrs Mandela and Criminal Justice, but missed out at the ceremony earlier this week. Sophie was on screens again this week in ITV1's acclaimed crime drama Father and Son, which was shown in a "stripped" format across consecutive nights. Who would you least like to be stuck on a desert island with? Take our fun quiz to get news to suit your interests  Everyone’s Talking about Enyeama by David Gendelman June 17, 2010 Nigeria's Vincent Enyeama saves a shot from Argentina's Lionel Messi at the World Cup, June 12, 2010. Photograph by Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images. Argentina scored in the sixth minute of its 1-0 World Cup opening match victory over Nigeria last Saturday. In that stretch of time, the Argentine Lionel Messi, the game’s greatest player, had already led his team to nearly striking soccer gold three times. Argentina dominated the match up to that point, and it dominated it for the 84 minutes that followed as well. And not only on the pitch. Its coach, Diego Maradona, one of the greatest players ever, ran after the ball when it bounced out of play almost as eagerly as Messi did when it was in play. So much fanfare had been made about how Maradona’s team and Messi himself would perform, and neither disappointed. Yet somehow that wasn’t what anyone was talking about after the game. They were talking about 27-year-old Vincent Enyeama, Nigeria’s goalkeeper, who breathtakingly stopped Messi four times and single-handedly kept his team in the game and the hopes of his nation alive. Even Messi and Maradona were talking about him. Messi called him “phenomenal”; Maradona called him “exceptional,” adding that “he was the one who made us suffer, because in football if you create chances and fail to convert then you can be punished.” While Enyeama’s performance might have been news to many of even the most educated soccer fans, it wasn’t to those who follow the game in Israel, where Enyeama plays his club football, for Hapoel Tel Aviv. “Whoever knows Enyeama and his ability wasn’t surprised,” Moshe Harush, a sportswriter who covers soccer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, told me. “We see this match after match in the Israel league, which is a big difference. But we all know what he can do. For a long time, everybody knows that he is the best goalkeeper ever landed in Israel, ever to play in the Israel league.” The worldwide audience was first introduced to Vincent Enyeama, a native of Akwa Ibom, on the southern coast of Nigeria, at the 2002 World Cup, when he earned a start in his country’s final group match against England. Nigeria was already eliminated, but England wasn’t and needed a positive result to make it to the next round. At the age of 19, Enyeama not only produced one of the most memorable saves of the tournament when he deflected Manchester United’s Paul Scholes’s thunderous 25-yard strike, but he held the desperate favorites scoreless and reliant on a shock result to advance, when Argentina failed to beat the heavy underdog Sweden. Now England has taken notice of him again. Arsenal and West Ham, whose new manager is the Israeli Avram Grant, have both expressed interest in purchasing Enyeama for next season, and they are already in competition with teams from Spain and Russia. Hapoel Tel Aviv has set his price at $5 million. That would come to the largest amount ever paid for an Israeli league player, and there seems to be no doubt that the club will get it. “All his friends from Hapoel Tel Aviv, they already feel sorry to lose him next season,” Harush says. Led in no small part by Enyeama, the 2008-2009 Israeli Premier League’s player of the year, Hapoel Tel Aviv won an Israeli double this season: its first championship in 10 years and the Israel State Cup. The league title puts the team in next year’s Champions League, but the players know that “without Enyeama the chance to go to the group stage [of that competition] is not so good.” Enyeama, who is nicknamed “The Cat,” for the way that he jumps after the ball, is not only an accomplished goal keeper, he is also an accomplished goal scorer. He put five goals into the net this season, all on penalties. He is Hapoel Tel Aviv’s designated penalty taker, at all times. “Even though Hapoel Tel Aviv lead the match 2-0 or 3-0 and some other players would like to have the penalty,” Harush says, “the coach of Hapoel Tel Aviv always calls Enyeama and tells him to go and take the penalty. ‘I don’t want to hear nobody. This is your mission.’” Enyeama doesn’t have only the support of the soccer faithful in Tel Aviv. He has the entire country’s. Every soccer fan in Israel watched Nigeria’s World Cup opener, and the next day the sports pages of every newspaper in Israel wrote only about how Enyeama had stopped the world’s greatest player, Lionel Messi, and at length, too. But the quiet and shy Enyeama doesn’t let the attention go to his head. He humbly acknowledged that the match against Argentina was a career game for him, saying, “It would be my best possible performance playing against the best possible player in the world, so it was my best.” And, as is his practice, he deflected all the attention onto a higher plane. “My secret lies with God,” he said. “Thanks to him I was able to do what I did today as he allowed me to stay calm under pressure.” Studying videos of 20 different Lionel Messi games probably didn’t hurt, either. But when Nigeria takes on Greece today, Nigeria will be looking for a win. To get that, Enyeama will need more support than his players gave him against Argentina. And if that doesn't happen, he may not only need to keep the balls out of the net. He may need to put them in, too. Bill Gates Visits Nigeria to Boost Global Fight Against Polio Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – Feb 2010 ABUJA, Nigeria – Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, today said that if Nigeria capitalizes on commitments made by state and federal governments, it can eradicate polio. Mr. Gates is in Nigeria to learn more about national immunization efforts and the country’s strategy to stop polio, a disease that still inflicts severe disability on Nigerian children. During a press conference in Abuja, Gates commended the renewed resolve he saw first-hand, and expressed optimism that leaders at all levels of the country will help create a movement to protect Nigerian children from polio and other vaccine preventable diseases. While in Nigeria, Gates observed the efforts of vaccination teams during a nationwide immunization. In Northern Nigeria, where the polio virus continues to circulate, he met with government officials, and traditional and religious leaders. He also met with mothers, traditional birth attendants, and representatives of a Muslim women’s association to discuss their personal experiences with immunization and ideas for achieving polio eradication. The Gates Foundation also finalized a $25 million agreement with the World Bank to support the purchase of more than 100 million doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV) in Nigeria. The agreement stipulates the Gates Foundation will "buy down" a World Bank loan to the Nigerian government to support polio eradication efforts. Relief of the loan is triggered when Nigeria achieves certain polio program milestones within the next three years, such as attaining 80 per cent vaccine coverage in each state. Rotary International and the UN Foundation have also used this innovative financing mechanism for vaccine purchase in Nigeria. Including this new agreement, the Gates Foundation has committed more than $700 million to polio eradication efforts worldwide. The foundation is actively working with development partners to meet the program’s ongoing financial requirements |