Literature

Calvin Burgess of Dominion Rice Writes on (Not) Doing Business in Nigeria

Published

8 years ago

March 4, 2018

Eric

In August of 2011, I was contacted by the Nigerian Minister of Agriculture and begged to come to Nigeria. He had just come from visiting our sister company in East Africa. He was very convincing. I along with another Board member soon arrived in Lagos to a great fanfare of private planes, helicopters, and fancy hotels. We were promised the world, if only we would come to Nigeria to build another Dominion Farms.

The 30,000 hectares of land offered by the Government looked great for farm development, located right between two rivers. Abundant water, the promise of a paved road, low interest government loans, streamlined import procedures, and help directly from the President himself. It was all “too-good-to-be-true”. We said we would consider it, and we did. Our first trips were to the community, the State Government, and to Upper Benue River Authority. In the community I personally spoke at every church open in the town and at the Mosque. Additionally, we held town hall meetings sponsored by the Emir for everyone in the area. Next we went to the State where I addressed the legislature and held press conferences. Lastly we went to Yola and spent a half of a day with the Upper Benue River Authority executives. In Abuja we had extensive meetings with the Minister of Agriculture, the Minister of Water, the ports and customs office and the US Embassy. All agencies offered their firm support for the project. Several trips later we made the decision to proceed.

On 17 February 2012 in the Abuja Hilton Hotel we signed an “MOU” with the State of Taraba and the Government of Nigeria. Hundreds were in attendance inviting us to come to Taraba and begin. Some of the terms of the agreement included Dominion training in modern agriculture for the masses, the State of Taraba paying all compensation to anyone on the land, and for a new road to be constructed. Ninety percent (90%) of the land was to be utilized in a community farming operation with trained local people being in possession of these lands and the remaining ten percent (10%) used as a nucleus farm for training purposes and support. The following day Dominion in conjunction with Taraba State paid for 50 local Nigerians to go to East Africa for six months of training.

What was supposed to happen in six months is still in the process over 3 1/2 years later. It has been a calamity of failed promises. The Government contracted for provision of a new all-weather road however, it is still a dirt trail as the Government funding did not exist. The promised financing from both the State of Taraba and the Government of Nigeria was all talk but no money. Help from the President came in the form of a waiver for all duty on Agricultural equipment for everyone in the Nation, not just us. Treasury and Customs quickly hid the waiver and hid it in their “Secret Files”. We fought for a year to get the promised exemptions and only after tape recording the direct demands for bribes from high officials in the Treasury did we even find out about the “Secret File”. The Treasury attempted direct extortion from our manager and he recorded it and gave the copy to the highest law enforcement agency in the land but the culprits scoff at us with impunity. Government officials asked us to just forget the whole thing and pretend it did not happen. That was two years ago and nobody has been prosecuted to date. In every facet of Nigerian society money does all of the talking, corruption reigns supreme, and nothing moves without dirty money to grease the way.

The land leased to us was and now still is partially occupied by Upper Benue. They have no lease nor is it in their mandate to occupy land, only to control the rivers. A broken down water treatment plant and many unoccupied homes and buildings came with the project. These were all master planned to be immediately converted into a training school with dorms, classrooms, and sports fields, but as we arrived Upper Benue changed their minds and refused to leave. Pleas to the Government brought little relief and finally they recommended we just build new facilities, but we had not budgeted for this. The State and Federal money promised for financing the project were just not there so finally TY Danjuma, a very influential and wealthy person from Taraba State came along and requested to be part of the project. The Danjuma Foundation committed to constructing a new school and that sealed the deal. Dominion partnered with TY.

As our equipment arrived at the ports, bribes were demanded. The clearing agents added “extras” to our billings and when we demanded to know what these were there was no response. We would not be part of their corruption. We eventually changed clearing agents and it helped for a while but it always came back to a hold-up about something. New rules were put into place as we attempted to bring in 120 shipments of supposedly exempt tractors, rice mills, and the like. The agents ignored the President’s directive. The Minister of Agriculture tried to intervene many times but to little or no avail. In the end we paid massive amounts of duty not budgeted for, but NOT ONE BRIBE! Delays added up so much demurrage that finally it was necessary to quit the fight.

We have totally experienced Nigeria. I have been extorted, arrested, detained, lied to, and about anything else one can imagine. We have held to our convictions, not paid bribes, obeyed the law, and kept our dignity, with our frustration levels continuing to rise on every occasion. Nonetheless, we have plodded on through years of delays, because we will not compromise our standards. It has cost us dearly in both interest and in valuable time. We have battled to import around 120 loads of equipment. Virtually everything is finally there for the making of a fantastic farm but it is years late in getting there. Every shipment was a struggle and a shakedown.

We began construction on the site including flood protection dikes, 12 small homes, a maintenance building and the beginnings of a rice mill. We started clearing lands and our relations with the community were good. Upper Benue still occupied the buildings but they had left the land. We were finally about ready to plant crops at the end of 2013 with the State of Taraba promising to pay compensation as was their contracted duty to do when things suddenly changed.

Shortly after we arrived in Taraba, the then Governor Danbaba Suntai made a serious mistake when he ordered the pilots off his plane and decided he would fly it himself. Of course he crashed and nearly killed himself and others on board. First they said he was dead but somehow revived him again but the time with no oxygen left him with serious mental problems. We now had an acting governor, Umar that was trying to fulfil his role but TY did not respect his position. The fight ensued and our road building stopped, the compensation from the state did not get paid and we sat still again. A cabal was formed to try and place the ailing governor back into his office. This was supported by my partner TY so here Dominion sat in the middle of a political war. Then the bomb dropped! An old consultant to Governor Suntai and some of his aids decided they needed to be back in control so they came to TY and fabricated a story of how Upper Benue and Dominion were having extreme difficulties and that the Federal Government had to pay the compensation. They took this to TY who evidently summoned the President to his house and passed on the fabricated story. Mr. President called the Minister of Water on the carpet. The Minister then called Upper Benue, and Upper Benue got mad. They felt Dominion had double crossed them, and now our good spirit of co-operation was gone and they decided to occupy the land. The State got involved along with the Minister of Agriculture and State legal counsel. In effect we have no land to occupy so no farming has been done and none will be. Two sections of Government lay claim to the land we were allocated and the battle goes on. The President gave a directive through the Minister of Water that Upper Benue vacate the premises completely and let Dominion operate unhindered. It is yet to be complied with ten (10) months after the order was issued! This was our main condition for opting to resume work rather than walk away from the project.

Boko Haram is a subject of its own. This group wants an Islamic State with no education for women, and only Islamic studies for men. They kill thousands and the government can seemingly do little or nothing to intervene. They kidnap hundreds of young girls at one time and the army can’t find them. Kidnapping of foreign nationals is part of how they finance their operations, and many expats just end up dead. Boko Haram has formed a caliphate like ISIS in Iraq and is already capturing multiple cities in Northern Nigeria. In Taraba State the Muslim Fulani tribe of nomadic people has taken up a war with the TIV and Jukun tribes of Christian and Animist people. These groups kill each other weekly and between them all, thousands have been killed or driven from their homes. Their domain is moving closer to us. It used to be three hundred kilometers away from us, then two hundred, and now it is just next door.

Meanwhile, Dominion has six policemen protecting the equipment on what is supposedly our land which is occupied by everyone but us. Around 1,000 hectares were cleared in March of 2014, by Dominion in readiness for planting by Dominion. Instead Upper Benue, in conjunction with the local community, moved in and planted their crops! There seems be no let up as everyone is ready to go back to the same land in the next cropping season!

Dominion is caught with no way forward. I now must have heavily armed police protection with me for safety at all times and this is no way to run an operation. Our operations manager and his family have been moved away from the location for their own protection.

The final blow came with an article by the Times of London. It is obvious they put a lot of work into this story in order to make Dominion a villain of some sort. Dominion has been accused of taking land, displacing people, and using dangerous chemicals, when in fact not one of the accusations is remotely true. Dominion was not aware of the presence of the reporters even though the journalist had to pass right in front of our offices and operational area at the farm site with Upper Benue and the locals the day they visited the site. No one deemed it fit to hear or ask side of the story, nor were we given adequate time to respond to the many allegations outlined in the article. The images in the article are a true representation of the lack of current farming activity with not a single home on the ground. This appropriately describes how we have not occupied anything or displaced anyone. As for journalism this is nothing more than a smear campaign on the Nigerian Government and upon Dominion Rice and Integrated Farms.

Nigeria is in a crisis. In reality it is much easier for an investor to leave Nigeria than to come and invest in such a stressful climate. Environmental Rights Action (ERA) / Friends of the Earth Nigeria (FOEN) and Center of Environment Education and Development (CEED) all boast of your decision to support the communities affected by Dominion. It is now your obligation to do so. The people of Nigeria need massive support and huge investments. These precious people lack desperately for every need of life. What will you do for them when their children are hungry, and there is nobody to turn to? Please take up the challenge and invest the billions of Naira necessary to change these lives. Dominion will no longer be in your way.

Sincerely,

Calvin Burgess, Chairman

Dominion Rice and Integrated Farms, Ltd.

Literature

The Death of Nuance by Adeoye Inioluwa

Published

7 days ago

June 6, 2026

Eric

We are living in one of the noisiest periods in modern history.

Never before have so many people had access to platforms powerful enough to shape public opinion within seconds. A single tweet can spark outrage. A thirty-second video can destroy reputations. A headline can travel farther than the truth itself.

Yet, despite being more connected than ever, meaningful conversation appears to be dying.

Today’s culture rewards speed over understanding. People rush to react before they reflect. Complex issues are reduced to hashtags, and disagreement is increasingly treated as hostility rather than an opportunity for intellectual engagement.

Perhaps most worrying is the growing normalization of selective empathy. Many people only defend humanity when it concerns people who look like them, speak like them, worship like them, or belong to the same social and political circles. Once empathy becomes conditional, division becomes inevitable.

This is how ignorance quietly evolves into intolerance.

Xenophobia, discrimination, and social hostility rarely begin with violence. They often begin with narratives — repeated assumptions, inherited prejudices, and the refusal to understand people outside one’s immediate environment. Over time, stereotypes become accepted as facts, and fear becomes easier than curiosity.

Ironically, history consistently proves that societies thrive not in isolation, but through exchange. Economies grow through migration, innovation grows through collaboration, and cultures evolve through interaction. The greatest cities in the world became influential precisely because they attracted different kinds of people and ideas.

The danger, therefore, is not diversity.
The danger is intellectual laziness.

A society unwilling to ask questions eventually becomes vulnerable to manipulation. When citizens stop reading deeply, listening carefully, or engaging thoughtfully, public discourse becomes vulnerable to propaganda, sensationalism, and emotional extremism.

This is why media literacy has become one of the most important survival skills of the modern era. The ability to distinguish information from noise may ultimately determine the quality of future democracies.

But beyond institutions and politics, there is also an individual responsibility. Every generation must decide whether it wants to inherit prejudice or challenge it. Whether it wants to amplify fear or expand understanding.

Because civilizations are not destroyed only by wars or economic collapse.
Sometimes, they slowly decline through the normalization of ignorance.

And perhaps that is the defining challenge of this generation. Not merely learning how to speak louder, but also learning how to think deeper.

Literature

Survival, Soft Life and Side Hustles

Published

2 weeks ago

May 29, 2026

Eric

By Anjorin Fehintola Stella

There is a quiet transformation happening among young Nigerians today; one that does not always make the headlines, but shows up in the numbers, in the timelines, in the conversations happening in kitchens, group chats and rented apartments across the country.

Across cities and small towns alike, an increasing number of young people are re-inventing themselves in real time, switching careers, learning digital skills, building online businesses, creating brands from their bedrooms and refusing to remain confined to traditional definitions of success.

For many, survival is no longer just about finding a job. It is about creating opportunities where none seems to exist. A generation once told to follow predictable paths is now embracing uncertainty, adaptability and self-reinvention as a way of life.

To understand why, one has to understand what was handed over to this generation. They were raised on the promise that education was the key, only to graduate into a job market that had misplaced the lock. Young people who did everything right, studied hard, earned degrees, dressed sharp for interviews, were still told, in one way or another, that there wasn’t space for them at the table.

Economic uncertainty has played a major role in this shift. In a country where traditional employment opportunities are increasingly limited, many young Nigerians have been forced to think beyond conventional career structures. Side hustles have evolved into full time businesses. Skills once dismissed as hobbies such as makeup artistry, hairstyling, content creation, fashion branding, photography and digital marketing are now becoming legitimate sources of income and influence.

Social media has also accelerated this culture of reinvention. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn have exposed young people to new possibilities beyond their immediate environments. Today, a young person in Lagos can learn a skill online, build a customer base digitally and create a brand capable of reaching audiences far beyond Nigeria’s borders.

What makes this moment fascinating is that the reinvention is not uniform, it doesn’t have a single face. It is the law graduate who now runs a thriving catering business and carries no shame about it. It is the banker who wakes up one morning, looks at the spreadsheets, and decides that her real life is in fashion design. These are not people who failed at their original paths. These are people who outgrew them. There is a difference, and it matters.

Yet, beneath the aesthetics of entrepreneurship and online visibility lies a deeper reality, many young people are reinventing themselves not purely out of passion, but out of necessity. Reinvention has become both a survival strategy and a response to a rapidly changing world. And the quietness of it all is deliberate. Previous generations reinvented loudly, with declarations, and testimonies and big announcements. This generation has watched too many people announce transformations that never survived contact with Monday morning. So they build in silence. They learn the skill quietly, save the money quietly, test the idea quietly. And by the time the world notices, the transformation is already complete and too solid to be talked out of, too real to be dismissed.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this generation is its refusal to remain stagnant. Faced with economic pressure, social expectations and an unpredictable future, many young Nigerians are choosing adaptation over defeat. They are learning, unlearning and rebuilding themselves repeatedly in search of stability, relevance and purpose. They want autonomy. They want meaning. And perhaps most radically, they want multiple things to be true about them at once, to be the professional and the artist, the corporate and the creative, the serious and the soft. They are done choosing.

In many ways, reinvention is no longer an exception among young people today. It has quietly become a defining characteristic of an entire generation. And if you are somewhere in the middle of your own, in that in-between space where you are no longer who you were but not yet fully who you are becoming, the silence is not failure. The silence is the work.

Literature

Exhausted? I’m Fine, I Think… By Adeoye Inioluwa

Published

2 weeks ago

May 27, 2026

Eric

There is a strange kind of exhaustion that does not announce itself.

It does not always look like collapse or crisis. It often looks like productivity. People still go to work, still reply messages, still meet deadlines, still laugh at the right moments. From the outside, everything appears intact.

But internally, something is constantly draining.

We rarely talk about this state because it is inconvenient to define. It does not fit neatly into categories of “well” or “unwell.” So instead, it becomes something people quietly endure — a background fatigue that slowly reshapes how life feels.

In modern society, being busy has almost become a moral achievement. Rest is postponed until everything is finished, yet everything is never truly finished. There is always another email, another expectation, another version of ourselves we are trying to improve.

At some point, exhaustion stops feeling temporary and starts feeling like personality.

What makes this even more complicated is that many people are not technically breaking down. They are functioning. And because they are functioning, they assume they should not complain. After all, there are others who seem to be coping better, achieving more, handling more.

So silence becomes the default response.

We learn to say “I’m fine” with increasing efficiency, not because it is true, but because it is easier than explaining a fatigue that has no dramatic shape. There is no single event to point to. No visible wound. Just a gradual thinning of energy, patience, and emotional availability.

Perhaps the most overlooked part of this experience is how normal it has become. Entire generations are growing accustomed to living slightly detached from themselves — present in body, absent in feeling. Constantly reachable, but rarely restored.

And yet, nothing about this state is actually sustainable.

Human beings were not designed for continuous performance. There is a reason rest exists not as luxury, but as necessity. When rest is treated as optional, everything else slowly becomes heavier than it should be.

Maybe the issue is not that people are weak, but that the standard for “coping” has quietly shifted beyond what is healthy. We praise endurance without asking what it is costing.

And so the question becomes less about how much more people can take, and more about why taking less has become so difficult to justify.

Because sometimes, what we call normal life is simply prolonged depletion — widely shared, rarely named, and almost never questioned.