Wednesday Morning, 1st April

Waterfalls of gurara

No April Fools’ day for us! We were up and off to a Niger State tourist development site – the waterfalls of Gurara, sourced from the River Niger further upstream. There was a plan to build all of the following on this site:

• a golf course,
• a hotel or three,
• a hydro power station,
• a kids’ camp,
• a park,
• a zoo,
• an amusement area,
• a tourist walk,
• various refreshment stations… you get the picture. ..
• and presumably a whole lot more.

Proposal for the development of gurara falls

We all looked somewhat amazed as we baked in the heat and looked at the area under consideration. The only relief was the falling water to a pool below. But this is where the hydro station would be located, eating into the relief of the rocks behind the waterdrop. $2bn dollars of investment is sought. I imagined the track of a golf ball as it veered off the fairway, hurtled through the entertainment tents, past the mouth of a beast in the zoo, jamming the hydro generation station below. The target customers for this new development would be foreigners or wealthy Nigerians. Some in the group were worried that foreigners would never even make it to the site, given the quality of the roads. Hmm. Food for thought, we thought.

Lunch – serendipity and mango
I haven’t mentioned yet that everywhere we go, we run into friends of Yemi’s or Tolu’s or David’s. And lunchtime at the hotel provided another such example. Sharp eyed Tolu spotted, over her mango smoothie, the face of the current Chairman of Etisalat, Nigeria’s 4th GSM provider, an Oxford Alumni and an invitee to the Africa Conference held in Oxford on May 1st.

David and Yemi boldly approached. Yes, he would be delighted to come to the conference. He would have loved to have hosted us, but we were returning to Lagos then. Hakeem Belo-Osagie offers scholarships to four African undergrads at Balliol each year to applicants that have applied to a University Clarendon Fund Award. He wants to keep in contact with the Africa OBN. Our chance rendez-vous was serendipitous, to say the least.
Evening at Yemi’s friends’
Yemi, you now realize, is Miss Fixit. Whatever needs doing in Lagos, she can fix it. She fixed a wonderful accommodation for us all to stay in while we were trekking in Lagos. This avoided the need for a hotel and gave us plenty of common space to watch rap and chat. Yemi’s kind friends hosted the lot of us for supper providing us with another example of fantastic extensive Nigerian hospitality!
We are now up to about 9 of us. Our host had recently completed the Sloan Fellowship programme at LBS . His neighbour was another friend of Yemi’s (they had studied together in Washington DC).