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Continent of Gigantic ProblemsNigeria: A disaster waiting to happenBlack racism or just everyday rudeness? A country that does not welcome tourists.Are you stupid? Use your credit card! Over-employment in the civil service. Oil blessingas a curse. Corruption. MPs earning three times more than the U.S. president ina country, where 84 % of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. From independenceto war and famine in Biafra, 33 years of military dictatorships and today’sprecarious democracy. North against South—specifically, Muslims against Christiansand vice versa. How Nigerian muftis helped to prevent global eradication of polio.Western education is forbidden! Petrol revolt and prospects of “Nigerian Spring”.There are many jokes circulating in Kenya. One of them goes like this:A father of four children says to a father of six children: “We do not plan to have another one.”“Why is that?”“Well, my wife has heard somewhere that every fifth African is a Nigerian.”The current status of Nigeria is very shaky with humorous descriptions describing it asbeing a giant on clay feet. The status of this country and its 170 million people (CIA estimatein July 2012) 46 who live in an area of ​924,000 km 2 is nothing but a joke. In this book, Nigeriawill serve as an illustration of how things can go in a country which was endowed withenormous natural wealth. Probably nothing characterizes Africa’s most populous countrymore accurately than the expression “a disaster waiting to happen”.Most Central Europeans have an understanding of Nigeria based on sporadically emergingreports about Nigerian criminals. Including reports about Nigerians arrested at airportswith cocaine packages hidden in their rectum, or from the flood of spam e-mails withstories about how somebody has inherited millions of dollars from a Nigerian general andwould like to share it with you. A few years ago such emails flooded email inboxes just as46 The World Factbook, CIA, accessed 2012-12-12 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/ni.html63