As American warplanes patrol the skies of Libya and American boots continue to keep the peace in Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Cuba, the Netherland Antilles, and more than 140 other countries, the international Interwebs recording sensation Remy unveils this timely song reminding all of us back on the home front about why they fight now. And why they fought then. “Why They Fought” is the first of a series of collaborations between Remy and Reason.tv. To watch Remy’s other videos, go to http:youtube.com/goremy Download the mp3, get lyrics, and related links at reason.tv, the video channel for Reason magazine and http Music written and performed by Remy. Video produced by Austin and Meredith Bragg. About 2 minutes.
The ICRC was one of the few aid agencies still operating in war-torn Somalia
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East Africa hunger crisis
Combating famine
Refugee success stories
In pictures: War and famine
Rains fail to ease crisis
Somalia's al-Shabab militants have banned the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from operating in parts of the country it controls.
The Islamist group said the ICRC had falsely accused them of blocking aid and had been handing out unfit food.
Al-Shabab controls large parts of north and central Somalia, which is suffering the worst drought in decades.
The ICRC, one of the few aid agencies operating there, said it had not heard about the ban.
The agency had suspended food distribution earlier this month saying militants had blocked supply routes, but it was still providing emergency care and water programmes.
Al-Shabab had already halted the work of several aid agencies working in the famine-hit region, including some from the UN. It accused them of exaggerating the scale of the problems for political reasons, and trying to convert Muslims to Christianity.
In a statement, it said the ICRC had “repeatedly betrayed the trust conferred on it by the local population and, in recent weeks, falsely accused the mujahideen [al-Shabab fighters] of hindering food distribution”.
The group said 70% of food it had inspected in ICRC warehouses was unfit for human consumption, and that it had since destroyed nearly 2,000 tonnes of “expired” rations.
Somalia is said to be one of the world's most dangerous places for aid workers to operate. It has not had a functioning central government for more than 20 years and has been wracked by fighting between various militias.
The UN-backed government runs only a few areas, including the capital, Mogadishu, which al-Shabab withdrew from in August.
The UN says the areas worst affected by famine are in the southern and central areas, which are under the control of the al-Qaeda linked group.
The UN has denounced the bombing of a camp housing some 5,000 refugees in South Sudan near the border with Sudan.
A boy was injured and 14 other people went missing during the air raid in El Foj in Upper Nile state on Monday, the UN refugee agency said.
A Sudan army spokesman told the BBC that Sudanese forces had not carried out any bombing raids in the area.
South Sudan split from Sudan last July and since then their relationship has deteriorated.
Both countries accuse the other of backing rebels operating in their territories and it is not the first time South Sudan has been bombed – there were attacks in Upper Nile state and Unity state last year.
Refugees fled
The UNHCR says a plane dropped several bombs on Monday morning which landed on the transit site for those who have fled the conflict in Blue Nile over the border in Sudan.
“Bombing of civilian areas must be condemned in the strongest terms,” Mireille Girard, UNHCR's representative in South Sudan, said in a statement.
The BBC's James Copnall in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, says the UN did not say who was responsible, but the refugees will almost certainly suspect the Sudanese Armed Forces.
Blue Nile is one of three border areas – along with South Kordofan and Abyei – where fighting has broken out since South Sudan's independence.
Many rebels in these regions fought alongside southerners during the decades-long civil war that ended with Khartoum agreeing to the south's independence.
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Analysis
Martin Plaut BBC World Service Africa editor
Relations between Khartoum and Juba are clearly at breaking point. Since South Sudan won independence last July, there has been no end of trouble along their border. At times their armed forces have clashed, using tanks and aircraft, but no all-out conflict.
But the dispute over oil could push relations over the edge. South Sudan has decided to close its oil production after Sudan seized crude oil piped through its territory to reach international markets. Both countries depend almost entirely on oil for their revenues. They have few alternatives to fall back on.
For South Sudan there is the option of finding a route to the sea via Kenya. There are reports that the authorities in Juba will announce the building of a pipeline through Kenya next week. Another possibility is taking the oil in tankers by road. Both are hugely ambitious, but South Sudan argues that it survived years of war and could survive whatever comes its way.
For Sudan, the reduction in oil revenues has already caused difficulties, with people complaining of rising prices.
Both Sudan and South Sudan have much to lose by continued confrontation, but at the moment there seems little appetite in either capital to find a compromise.
South Sudan to suspend oil output
Sudan's army spokesman Khalid Sawarmi said Sudanese forces had been recently involved in fighting against rebels in Blue Nile in the village of Aroum.
“We attacked them and drove them out of this place. [We] did not use any planes or Antonovs there,” he told the BBC.
Following the strike on El Foj, most people have now fled the area or have been helped to relocate by the UN, the agency says.
The authorities in Upper Nile state say they do not have first-hand confirmation of an incident at El Foj.
However Upper Nile's Information Minister Peter Lam Both did accuse Sudan of carrying out another air raid in the state on Sunday.
He told the BBC that three people were killed and four wounded in Khor Yabous, near the border with Sudan.
He also said South Sudan's army had fought off an attack by militias around this time.
The UN says more than 78,000 people have fled Sudan since last August because of fighting in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile.
Our correspondent says the latest incident highlights the bad relationship between the two countries as well as the difficult situation many refugees face.
Recently the focus has been on oil resources, with South Sudan deciding last week to shut down its production rather than, as it sees it, have some of its oil stolen by the north, he says.
The two sides are currently discussing how to share their oil resources at talks in Ethiopia.
But whatever the full truth of the matter, the greatest concern to many is security not oil, our reporter says.
Sudan: A country divided
Geography
Ethnic groups
Infant mortality
Water & sanitation
Education
Food insecurity
Oil fields
Show regions
The great divide across Sudan is visible even from space, as this Nasa satellite image shows. The northern states are a blanket of desert, broken only by the fertile Nile corridor. South Sudan is covered by green swathes of grassland, swamps and tropical forest.
Sudan’s arid north is mainly home to Arabic-speaking Muslims. But in South Sudan there is no dominant culture. The Dinkas and the Nuers are the largest of more than 200 ethnic groups, each with its own languages and traditional beliefs, alongside Christianity and Islam.
The health inequalities in Sudan are illustrated by infant mortality rates. In South Sudan, one in 10 children die before their first birthday. Whereas in the more developed northern states, such as Gezira and White Nile, half of those children would be expected to survive.
The gulf in water resources between north and south is stark. In Khartoum, River Nile, and Gezira states, two-thirds of people have access to piped drinking water and pit latrines. In the south, boreholes and unprotected wells are the main drinking sources. More than 80% of southerners have no toilet facilities whatsoever.
Throughout Sudan, access to primary school education is strongly linked to household earnings. In the poorest parts of the south, less than 1% of children finish primary school. Whereas in the wealthier north, up to 50% of children complete primary level education.
Conflict and poverty are the main causes of food insecurity in Sudan. The residents of war-affected Darfur and South Sudan are still greatly dependent on food aid. Far more than in northern states, which tend to be wealthier, more urbanised and less reliant on agriculture.
Sudan exports billions of dollars of oil per year. Southern states produce more than 80% of it, but receive only 50% of the revenue. The pipelines run north but the two sides have still not agreed how to share the oil wealth in the future.
BOWDON, Ga. – The Georgia man who is now home safe after being kidnapped in Nigeria says he was on his way to a clinic in the African country when two men ambushed his car.
Greg Ock tells The Associated Press his car was idling in traffic in a remote town when the two men came out of nowhere. One gunned down his security guard and another forced him into a waiting vehicle that sped him away.
Ock was held in captivity for seven days before he was released Friday. He returned to Georgia on Sunday.
He said he was working as a contractor maintaining gas turbines and other equipment.
Ock says he was never tortured, but he was roughed up after trying to escape.
Ock, who is 50, said he didn’t know if his company paid the $330,000 his captors demanded for his safe return.
Mr Ng'eno co-founded Winafrique Technologies Ltd in 2001
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African Dream
'Method to my madness'
Too young for business?
New leaders required
Flower power
Many things may be lacking in Africa but there are two which are abundant and free all over the continent – wind and sunlight – and Kenya's Anthony Kiptoo Ng'eno decided to turn them into a profit.
In 2001 he and his partner Michael G Chavanga formed a company, Winafrique Technologies Ltd, with the goal of taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the renewable energy market in East and Central Africa.
“When we started off the company, we were given a very difficult challenge of powering a very remote site, and we quickly realised that conventional power could not reach where this project was going to happen and diesel engines were also going to be very expensive, so we started looking at renewable energy,” Mr Ng'eno told the BBC's series African Dream.
“We quickly got training from China, Hong Kong and the US on how to design, supply and maintain, and we met quite a few people – consultants, engineers – who also helped us build the company along the way,” he said.
“Once we recognised that there was that niche, it was just pure focus. We knew we could do it, and we just went after it”.
Winafrique's main investment has been in wind-solar hybrid energy but it also works on water pumps and energy storage.
The company offers its services to private clients and to governments, aid agencies and businesses.
Green pioneer
So far the company has installed more than 150 hybrid power systems in different parts of Kenya. Winafrique is also in charge of their maintenance.
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Anthony Kiptoo Ng'eno
Age: 38
Hobbies: Travelling, swimming, reading and listening to music
Studied Computing and IT at the Open University in the UK
Worked on the Asian Sky Project in London
Trained as a windpower installer with US-based firm Bergey
Co-founded Winafrique Technologies Ltd in 2001
Winafrique has won several green awards, including the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Pioneer in 2011
The company has established partnerships with Safaricom, the country's main mobile telephony firm, and with the low-energy computer provider Inveneo, among others.
It has also worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross to provide wind and solar power to a water desalination plant in Lamu, on the Kenyan coast.
Winafrique's work and its positive environmental impact have not gone without recognition.
In 2009 it was the winner of a Green Telecoms Award at the AfricaCom conference in South Africa, in 2010 it was chosen as the Best Green LTE Product or Initiative at the LTE World Summit in the Netherlands, and in 2011 the company was recognised as a Bloomberg New Energy Finance Pioneer.
“I have a passion for green energy as it is one of the technological leaps that will allow Africa to address its development challenges,” Mr Ng'eno said.
Surprised looks
The entrepreneur, who previously worked in London and has a degree in Computing and IT from the Open University in the UK, said that getting initial funding for Winafrique was not easy.
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“It was a start-up, a completely new idea, a new concept, so there was a lot of resistance, a lot of surprised looks when we introduced ourselves for what it is and what we are doing,” he told the BBC.
“The business side of it was very difficult because nobody had done it before, specifically the way we were going to look at it. There was no track record for anybody to follow so everything was purely first time.
“You go into a bank and you have to negotiate from zero, you have to sell them the idea of what it is that you're doing before they can finance the idea. It was a very engaging process and it has taken us up to today”.
But he admitted that he could have helped to kick-start his company by writing a better business plan.
“I think that's what we needed, a more aggressive business plan, more engagement of finances, probably, I think those are the two main issues.”
Does he have any advice for younger entrepreneurs?
“Hard work, hard work, hard work, and you also have to focus the hard work – you have to have a strategy,” he said.
“You have to have a product, and be organised, all the way from your internal organisation to your financial organisation to the structure of your company.”
African Dream is broadcast on the BBC Network Africa programme every Monday morning.
Every week, one successful business man or woman will explain how they started off and what others could learn from them.
This video was originally made by former You Tuber named AfroChoc. AfroChoc is from Nigeria & is Igbo herself. 1. I do not own any copy right to any pics. Audio tracks in this video belongs to INgrooves 2. I do not plan to make any profits off the material in the video Israelite Migrations To West Africa Between the second and third centuries, the black Jews of Arabia continued migrating across the Red Sea to Ethiopia. The largest exodus of Jews ocured during the persecution by Arabs led by Mohammed. He had said on his dying bed that he wanted Islam to be supreme throughout all of Arabia. There was a Jewish tribe called Rechab which crossed the Red Sea and migrated to the extreme point of western Sudan. At the same time that Jews were migrating westward across the Sudan from Ethiopia, they also migrated southward from Libya,Tunisia,Algeria, and Morocco, to the fertile region between Senegal and Niger rivers. When Jews from the North and the east met between these two rivers, they establish a confluence or crossroad in West Africa, where men could exchange their culture,ideas,and merchandise. These Jewish migrations went on with great frequency about 300 AD and they continued with utmost regularity for twelve hundreds years. Joseph J. Williams points out the course of the Jews migrated up the Nile passing Memphis,Elephantine, Khartum, and ten they turned west at Kordofan in central Sudan. In the region of the White Nile, Williams thinks some Jews settled in the country of … Video Rating: 4 / 5
BOWDON, Ga. – As the car an American man was riding in idled in traffic in a remote Nigerian town, two men appeared, one of them shooting the Georgia man’s security guard five times, while the other forced him into a tiny getaway car that sped away.
The car weaved through traffic on side roads and then sped to a main road, where police, known there as “mopols,” had erected a roadblock. Greg Ock’s captors crashed through the barricade and traded fire with a truck of police officers, who narrowly missed the 50-year-old Ock.
“I felt like I was in an action movie,” Ock told The Associated Press at his west Georgia home on Monday, a day after he returned to his family. As they were speeding away from the police, he said he told his guards: “I was more afraid of mopols than you guys.”
Ock was kidnapped on Jan. 20 in Warri, a main city in the Niger Delta, an oil-rich area where foreign firms pump 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day. After being held seven days, he was released on Friday.
Ock worked in construction for decades, landing gigs all over the U.S. and as far away as Abu Dhabi. He loved the work, the camaraderie and the pay, which helped him support a wife and four daughters.
He landed in the Nigerian town of Sapele in September 2010 to begin one of his more adventurous assignments, maintaining gas turbines and other heavy machinery for Marubeni Corp.
It was tough work and the perks weren’t enticing. The food was bad, he said, and the heat was unbearable. But he had chances to leave the “little prison” of the company’s base camp, often going on Sundays with co-workers and a security guard to a golf course, or to neighboring Benin to eat at a Chinese restaurant.
His journey the day he was ambushed wasn’t nearly as adventurous. He went with a driver, a security guard and a company secretary to a clinic in Warri, where he would get a checkup for a recent bout with malaria.
He took out some cash from an ATM, hopped in the car and tuned his iPod to Don Henley as the driver waited in traffic. What happened next seemed to unfold in a flash.
A gunman ran up to his vehicle and yelled “die, mopol, die” as he fired five bullets into the guard. The other gunman ordered Ock out of the car and pushed him toward a tiny red Audi.
“They told me we were an easy target. We didn’t have tinted windows and only one mopol,” he said. “They told me they wanted a white guy anyways.”
They escaped the city, and one of the kidnappers then called Ock’s boss and demanded about $330,000 for his safe return.
They drove about an hour, arriving at a squat shack where he was forced into a small room. He shared the room with two or three guards, a plastic chair, piles of dirty dishes, some scattered clothes and a mattress blocking the window.
The men dulled his senses by forcing him to smoke marijuana and drink Baron Del Valle red wine at all hours. He didn’t have many food options, either. Early in his captivity, Ock said he asked for boiled eggs. From then on, he got four eggs in the morning and four at night. As a snack, he got apples.
He was told few details about the negotiations his captors were working with his company, adding to his unease. When he was able to sleep, his captors often woke him by cranking an odd mix of local music and Dolly Parton classics from a stereo.
“I was on the edge all the time,” he said.
After a few days, he decided to escape. He found a butcher knife resting in a bowl and reached for it when he thought his captors were sleeping. They weren’t. One alerted the others, who “slapped me around a bit” and chained him tighter to his chair. Despite the beating, Ock said he wasn’t tortured.
The next morning, a guard pulled out a gun and threatened to kill his captive. Ock called his bluff.
“I told them I didn’t care,” he said. “I’ve had a good life.”
On Thursday, Ock could tell the negotiations were heating up. His captors were celebrating and drinking moonshine. Two of the men left the house around noon, returning five hours later with wide smiles.
Around 3:30 Friday morning, the men dumped Ock in a desolate area with about $12 to hail a scooter to the nearest police station. Once there, he called his boss and his wife to let them know he was OK.
Ock said he wasn’t told by either his captors or his company whether a ransom was paid.
“But they seemed happy,” he said. “They let me go for a reason — and I don’t think it was because they were out of eggs.”
Marubeni Corp. on Monday declined to comment on how Ock was released. U.S. embassy officials also declined to offer any details, citing privacy concerns.
He returned home on Sunday morning, arriving at Atlanta’s airport to a rapturous greeting from family and friends. There, a limousine drove him the 60-mile route to rural Bowdon. Someone told Ock to peek out the sunroof as they approached, and when he did he saw about 500 people gathered to celebrate.
Among the gifts he received was a plastic bag with only an egg and an apple. The friend who offered it to him joked that she didn’t know if he wanted breakfast or supper, so she brought both.
Ock has no plans to return to Nigeria, instead looking for work closer to home. But his wife Teresa said she doubts his kidnapping will scare him from working another faraway gig.
“It’s in his blood to travel,” she said. “He may work here for a while. But I know him. He’ll get to itching to leave.”
For now, Ock is catching up on sleep and making up for lost time.
“It’s taken a while to process it all. For us, too,” Teresa Ock said. “We’re just so thankful for the prayers, from our church, from our community, from everyone who prayed for him.”
She glanced at her husband, who summoned an impish smile.
“I guess I’ve got to go to church now,” he said.
___
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When Ghana's Kofi Dadzie first thought about the impact that the marriage of information technology and business could have in Africa, he realised that it would offer some opportunities too good to miss.
It was in the late 1990s. He was in the United States, studying at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and after a summer internship he started to reconsider his dream of becoming a mechanical engineer.
On second thoughts, he decided to get a degree in computer engineering instead.
“I was just very excited about what I felt that could be done back home,” he told the BBC's series African Dream.
Today the company that he started in 2001 with his business partner Ehizogie Binitie, Rancard Solutions Ltd, is considered one of the leading IT firms in West Africa.
Last year, Rancard Solutions was selected as one of the top 15 companies of the continent during the Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship, out of 3,300 candidates.
The firm has now offices in Ghana and Nigeria and mobile service delivery in 32 markets in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
It develops software and services that clients such as Vodafone, Tigo, Google and Voice of America use to communicate with mobile phone users.
Too young for business?
Mr Dadzie was 24 when he started the company and, according to him, sometimes his age “could be a bit of a barrier”.
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Kofi Dadzie
Age: 34
Degree in computer engineering from Vanderbilt University, in the US
Worked for Dell Computer Corp as a senior analyst
Cofounded Rancard Solutions Ltd in 2001
Hobbies: Gardening, classical music, military history
Role models: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela
Named to Africa 40 under 40 in 2010 (TNJ magazine)
Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network/Africa Leadership Initiative, 2011
Rancard was selected as one of the top 15 companies in the 2011 Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship
“The way we held ourselves up and the way we communicated helped people who would be challenged by how young we looked get around that, but there were some cases where people made comments that suggested they believed or wanted to believe we were much older than we were,” he said.
He said that it seemed difficult for some of his first clients to accept the idea that he was probably 15 years younger than themselves and they had to sit at the same table and sign a contract.
However, in his opinion, being very confident helped him break the ice.
“To be honest, the most fundamental hurdle was our own lack of management experience because when we look back now, we realise that everything we did over those years we could have performed three to five times better with stronger marketing and stronger management and, as an entrepreneur, that has been the most significant lesson,” Mr Dadzie said.
The learning curve included transforming the focus of his senior team from pure engineering to business management.
“We're business managers now and we're constantly looking at what it means to effectively market and manage what we're doing,” he explained.
“We think that was more important than the infrastructure challenges because a strong management team will meet an obstacle and will develop a way around it. So the obstacles won't be our excuses for our past performance, in our earlier years, compared with how much better we are performing now.”
‘Learn the system’
Rancard Solutions' starting capital was raised at a family level and “ran out early”, according to Mr Dadzie.
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“There wasn't a venture capital industry locally and, in my opinion, there still really isn't, it's nascent,” he said.
“So, as the business matured – that is necessary for the banks to do anything with you in this part of the world – we started accessing short-term credit financing with the banks at tremendously high interest rates, and so that's what it's been.”
However, Mr Dadzie believes that entrepreneurs should not spend their energy battling against the system.
“Learn the system and apply yourself to it. Understand your marketing, understand your accountant, understand ethics and understand operations because you've got to be able to manage yourself, your people, your market and your product,” he suggests.
Another of his tips to aspiring business people is that they should start developing as quickly as possible a client base.
“It's very important to get one or two clients, even if it means to get some things in pro bono, just so you can develop some track record before you start generating some revenue.
“Once you can show some revenue stream and you can show some visible client list then people have a little bit more confidence that you've entered the system and therefore they can operate with you. It's a thing about transparency.”
Having said that, Rancard's managing director warns budding entrepreneurs to avoid starting too quickly.
“Spend a whole lot more time planning and understanding your market, and keep redeveloping your market and planning strategy until it makes sense in numbers – that is until you can clearly see that with X amount of money in Y time I can break even. Don't start until you figure that out,” he said.
“Secondly, get a good team. It's the structure of management, the structure of the business plan. Get those right. There will always be market demand for something good and something better. There is never a reason to rush ahead of preparation.”
African Dream is broadcast on the BBC Network Africa programme every Monday morning.
Every week, one successful business man or woman will explain how they started off and what others could learn from them.
BOWDON, Ga. – Two men came out of nowhere as Greg Ock’s car idled in traffic in a remote Nigerian town. One shot his security guard five times and stole the dead man’s gun, while the other ushered Ock into a tiny getaway car, where a waiting driver sped away.
The car weaved through traffic on side roads and then sped to a main road, where police, known there as “mopols,” had erected a roadblock. Ock’s captors crashed through the barricade and traded fire with a truck of police officers, who narrowly missed Ock.
“I felt like I was in an action movie,” Ock told The Associated Press at his west Georgia home on Monday, a day after he returned to his family. As they were speeding away from the police, he said he told his guards: “I was more afraid of mopols than you guys.”
Ock, 50, was held seven days and then released Friday after he was kidnapped Jan. 20 in Warri, a main city in the Niger Delta, an oil-rich area where foreign firms pump 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day.
Ock worked in construction for decades, landing gigs all over the U.S. and as far away as Abu Dhabi. He loved the work, the camaraderie and the pay, which helped him support a wife and four daughters.
He landed in the Nigerian town of Sapele in September 2010 to begin one of his more adventurous assignments, maintaining gas turbines and other heavy machinery for Marubeni Corp.
It was tough work and the perks weren’t enticing. The food was bad, he said, and the heat was unbearable. But he had chances to leave the “little prison” of the company’s base camp, often going on Sundays with co-workers and a security guard to a golf course, or to neighboring Benin to eat at a Chinese restaurant.
His journey the day he was ambushed wasn’t nearly as adventurous. He went with a driver, a security guard and a company secretary to a clinic in Warri, where he would get a checkup for a recent bout with malaria.
He took out some cash from an ATM, hopped in the car and tuned his iPod to Don Henley as the driver idled in traffic. What happened next seemed to unfold in a flash.
A gunman ran up to his vehicle and yelled “die, mopol, die” as he fired five bullets into the guard. The other gunman ordered Ock out of the car and pushed him toward a tiny red Audi.
“They told me we were an easy target. We didn’t have tinted windows and only one mopol,” he said. “They told me they wanted a white guy anyways.”
They escaped the city, and one of the kidnappers then called Ock’s boss and demanded about $330,000 for his safe return.
They drove about an hour, arriving at a squat shack where he was forced into a small room. He shared the room with two or three guards, a plastic chair, piles of dirty dishes, some scattered clothes and a mattress blocking the window.
The men dulled his senses by forcing him to smoke marijuana and drink Baron Del Valle red wine at all hours. He didn’t have many food options, either. Early in his captivity, Ock said he asked for boiled eggs. From then on, he got four eggs in the morning and four at night. As a snack, he got apples.
He was told few details about the negotiations his captors were working with his company, adding to his unease. When he was able to sleep, his captors often woke him by cranking an odd mix of local music and Dolly Parton classics from a stereo.
“I was on the edge all the time,” he said.
After a few days, he decided to escape. He found a butcher knife resting in a bowl and reached for it when he thought his captors were sleeping. They weren’t. One alerted the others, who “slapped me around a bit” and chained him tighter to his chair. Despite the beating, Ock said he wasn’t tortured.
The next morning, a guard pulled out a gun and threatened to kill his captive. Ock called his bluff.
“I told them I didn’t care,” he said. “I’ve had a good life.”
On Thursday, Ock could tell the negotiations were heating up. His captors were celebrating and drinking moonshine. Two of the men left the house around noon, returning five hours later with wide smiles.
Around 3:30 Friday morning, the men dumped Ock in a desolate area with about $12 to hail a scooter to the nearest police station. Once there, he called his boss and his wife to let them know he was OK.
Ock said he wasn’t told by either his captors or his company whether a ransom was paid.
“But they seemed happy,” he said. “They let me go for a reason — and I don’t think it was because they were out of eggs.”
A message sent to Marubeni Corp. for details about Ock’s release was not immediately returned. U.S. embassy officials earlier declined to offer any details, citing privacy concerns.
He returned home on Sunday morning, arriving at Atlanta’s airport to a rapturous greeting from family and friends. There, a limousine drove him the 60-mile route to rural Bowdon. Someone told Ock to peek out the sunroof as they approached, and when he did he saw about 500 people gathered to celebrate.
Among the gifts he received was a plastic bag with only an egg and an apple. The friend who offered it to him joked that she didn’t know if he wanted breakfast or supper, so she brought both.
Ock has no plans to return to Nigeria, instead looking for work closer to home. But his wife Teresa said she doubts his kidnapping will scare him from working another faraway gig.
“It’s in his blood to travel,” she said. “He may work here for a while. But I know him. He’ll get to itching to leave.”
For now, Ock is catching up on sleep and making up for lost time.
“It’s taken a while to process it all. For us, too,” Teresa Ock said. “We’re just so thankful for the prayers, from our church, from our community, from everyone who prayed for him.”
She glanced at her husband, who summoned an impish smile.
“I guess I’ve got to go to church now,” he said.
___
Follow Bluestein at http://www.twitter.com/bluestein
Burundi, one of the world's poorest nations, is emerging from a 12-year, ethnic-based civil war.
Since independence in 1961, it has been plagued by tension between the dominant Tutsi minority and the Hutu majority.
The ethnic violence sparked off in 1994 made Burundi the scene of one of Africa's most intractable conflicts.
It is now beginning to reap the dividends of a peace process. But it faces the formidable tasks of reviving a shattered economy and of forging national unity.
In 1993 Burundi seemed poised to enter a new era when, in their first democratic elections, Burundians chose their first Hutu head of state, Melchior Ndadaye, and a parliament dominated by the Hutu Front for Democracy in Burundi (Frodebu) party.
But within months Ndadaye had been assassinated, setting the scene for years of Hutu-Tutsi violence in which an estimated 300,000 people, most of them civilians, were killed.
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At a glance
Politics: Stability appears to be within reach after years of bloody conflict. The government and the last active rebel group signed a ceasefire in May 2008, but post-election tension in 2010 renewed fears of civil war
Economy: Half the population lives below the poverty line. Coffee and tea account for most of the foreign currency earnings
International: Relative peace after a 12-year ethnic-based civil war has been attributed partly to international mediation and support
Country profiles compiled by BBC Monitoring
In early 1994 parliament elected another Hutu, Cyprien Ntaryamira, as president. But he was killed in April alongside the president of neighbouring Rwanda when the plane they were travelling in was shot down over Kigali.
Another Hutu, Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, was appointed president in October 1994. But within months, the mainly Tutsi Union for National Progress (Uprona) party withdrew from the government and parliament, sparking a new wave of ethnic violence.
Following long-running talks, mediated by South Africa, a power-sharing government was set up in 2001 and most of the rebel groups agreed to a ceasefire. Four years later Burundians voted in the first parliamentary elections since the start of the civil war.
The main Hutu former rebel group won the vote and nominated its leader Pierre Nkurunziza as president.
The government and the United Nations embarked on the lengthy process of disarming thousands of soldiers and former rebels, as well as forming a new national army.
The ICRC was one of the few aid agencies still operating in war-torn Somalia
Martin Plaut BBC World Service Africa editor
Mr Ng'eno co-founded Winafrique Technologies Ltd in 2001
Mr Dadzie started Rancard Solutions in 2001
