This post concerns Nigeria’s image that pertains to ebusiness/ecommerce. As for the issues of politics, corruption e.t.c, we’ll discuss that another day.

I got a true experience about the way we are viewed by people outside Nigeria during my first week of classes.During lectures, a majority of course tutors found it compulsory to  associate Nigeria publicly with fraud. In one of the classes, the consultant from IBM actually had a full slide on ‘Nigerian Scam Mails’ among major internet security issues. i.e. we were next to viruses, rated next higher than spyware, Trojans.  Google even used a ‘Nigerian Scam’ as part of their April fool’s joke this year which  I found funny but sad.  I am amazed at the negative reputation Nigeria has and got within three years of getting online (we started actively in about 2000). Obviously we are not the only ones that perpetuate  fraud as you can see here but something must have made Nigeria become synonymous with online scams.

Continue readingCleaning Nigeria's image on the Internet: The way forward.