Nigerian Trainees

KEEN TO spread the word about paragliding as far and wide as possible you can imagine our delight when we received an overseas request for more info from Nigeria, of all places. The guy seemed to be interested in one of the ex-demo wings we had for sale in our small ads on the inside back cover of our online magazine. Always happy to pass on PG news, views and advice, here's the story.

Happy to strike up an online conversation with M'Bwana B'nana III, a surpisingly keen young pilot from Abuja, we replied to his email immediately. He seemed happy to purchase our wing for the price we were asking for, which somewhat surprised us as we had expected to enter a long and winding road of negotiations. After all we believed Nigeria to be a relatively poor country, on a global scale. Of course, at this time we were unaware of M'Bwana's Royal connections, but as we later learned, he probably wouldn't worry too much about a couple of thousand for a used paraglider. After a few weeks of bouncing emails off each other we settled on a means of payment and awaited his bank transfer. As soon as it arrived we shipped the wing. We also sent the extra cash, because, as it turns out, from inside Nigeria you can only transfer 10,000 EUR minimum, otherwise they get stung with 120% taxation. Bastard governments, we thought.

A week or so later we were chuffed when our new friend and Royal Prince, got in touch with us again and asked if we would like to be involved in helping his grandfather get some of his money out of Nigeria. It seems that since the decline of a moral and decent democracy, the new junta has clamped down on anything over 10 million leaving the country. Keen to help a fellow paraglider pilot we agreed to let his frail, aging gramps use our business accounts to transfer the funds. Like you would. Fellow pilot in need, and all that. M'Bwana said his grandad would let us keep about a half a million or so as a kind of thank-you. Well, that would come in handy when the Christmas party rolled round for sure.

Well that was 4 weeks ago now and, since then, we've started to get a bit worried about M'Bwana. If anyone knows if EasyJet fly to Nigeria we'd be pretty keen to have a timetable of their scheduled flights. We're quite desperate to get a cheap flight out there, because we've been checking and it seems M'Bwana may not be fully qualified to fly the EN-D wing we sent him and the last thing we would want is for him to hurt himself. We thought we'd take a trip out there and help train him ourselves and while there, maybe take in some of the tourist sights, some local cuisine and hopefully get a bit of our own African airtime.

M'Bwana must be away from his email at the moment. He hasn't replied to our requests for info on the nearest airport to all the paragliding sites out there. Be sure though, we'll let you know how we get on.

Pie in the Sky
Funnier than the 1908 "Louis Bleriot Tree-Landing" helmet cam video