Lemna's African Adventures

Lemna also is building roads in Calabar, a city located on the very southern tip of Nigeria. “It’s an interesting area because it’s surrounded on three sides by swamp,” says Dave Anderson, Lemna’s general manager, who works in Africa and the U.S.

Given Calabar’s swampy surroundings, steamy climate, and torrential rainy season, the window of opportunity for constructing roadways there is very small. Poor roads make it difficult to transport construction equipment. The port of Calabar is a shallow-drop port, meaning that large ships can’t deliver goods there because they can’t get close enough to the docks to unload without running aground. If Anderson must have his bulldozers shipped to Lagos, about 350 miles to the north to avoid the shallow port, it can take two days to drive them down to Calabar.

“Anything you build there is an accomplishment,” Anderson says of Nigeria. “It’s so difficult. It’s hard to find a good, skilled labor force—plus building materials and tools and electricity. Everything that we take for granted here [in the U.S.], you got to really think about it and plan for it [in Nigeria].”

Planning also extends to security. The Niger Delta, in particular, is known to be dangerous in places, especially for foreign companies trying to work there. Oil pipeline sabotage, kidnappings of foreign oil workers, and violence against foreign-owned companies and even Nigerian residents by anti-government groups and bandits regularly make the headlines. “It’s dangerous and you have to know what you’re doing,” Ngo says.

Ngo and his employees all seem to have their personal stories of danger in the delta. He recounts one American project manager’s confrontation with robbers who entered a restaurant where he and some colleagues were dining. The robbers brandished guns and demanded cash and jewelry while making their way around the tables. When they got to the Lemna manager, he took out his billfold, handed over $50, and asked, “Will that be enough?” Ngo laughs as he talks about it, but he soon gets serious again.

“Really, it’s more of a question of being proactive and having a strong community relations program,” Ngo says. “It’s not so much having 100 armed guards to protect against bandits that patrol around on Jeeps. It’s more preventive.”

Lemna doesn’t do any oil projects, preferring instead to work on “cleaner” energy sources such as natural gas and ethanol. Lemna would like to build an ethanol plant in Taraba, Nigeria, that would use sorghum and sugar cane as feedstock. A feasibility study for the plant has been completed; Lemna now is looking for funding for the project.

Elsewhere, on a 100-acre parcel of land outside Abeokuta, a city in southwestern Nigeria, Lemna is building a housing development that will resemble the kind of executive-level housing communities found in the United States. In addition to the residences, Lemna has overseen the construction of classrooms and living quarters for faculty and students at the school on the grounds of the Lord’s Estate. The school, called the Lemna American University Preparatory Academy, is expected to be finished next year.

The impetus for the Lord’s Estate project came from Oba Dopa Tejuoso, the king of Abeokuta. (There are about 250 kings in Nigeria presiding over major cities. They have governmental roles, but aren’t elected.) Tejuoso and his son, the prince of Abeokuta, approached Lemna in 2004 and asked the company to draw up plans. “We’re relying on the expertise of Lemna,” Prince Tejuoso says.