Tuesday 5 February 2013

CNN Amanpour Op-ed – What Nigeria and the Super Bowl have in common


CNN program, Amanpour, anchored by popular international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour parodies the power situation in Nigeria and its connection with the power outage at the just concluded American superbowl.
Do you think this sort of international exposure will help solve the power situation in the country?

(CNN) While American waited 35 minutes for the Super Bowl’s lights to come on, Nigerians just chuckled.
They know all too well the problem of power outages: Nigeria has been plagued by rolling blackouts that last hours, sometimes even days.
So as the television audience worldwide waited for the power to come back on, Nigerians took to social media with wit.
“Power outage at the Super Bowl on Sunday. Suddenly, Nigeria doesn’t look as dark anymore,” tweeted one Nigerian.
“If they had the Super Bowl in Nigeria, the power coming back on would be the real surprise,” another tweeted.
Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, recently told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that his country’s electrical woes have been improving.
“That is one area that Nigerians are quite pleased with the government, that commitment to improve power. It’s working,” President Jonathan told the president.
Many Nigerian viewers tweeted messages to Christiane Amanpour to express their continued frustrations about having to rely on back-up generators for power.
In the video below, you can watch an “Open Mic” series CNN conducted after Amanpour’s interview with President Jonathan. The Amanpour crew left a microphone in a public place and recorded Nigerians expressing their frustrations with their notoriously unreliable power supply.

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