LAGOS, Nigeria—It was a good day for the Ram Lovers Association of Nigeria one recent Sunday.

The fan favorite, a shaggy golden brown ram named Gobe, won the main event and got his owner a refrigerator and a dousing of gin and soda.

“It’s the power of God,” said Lalekun Bayewu, Gobe’s owner, a 45-year-old machine operator. “Gobe is like my child, I love him so much.”

Despite a few drunken fistfights, and a single errant gunshot, the 13th annual Ram Fighting Championships went off without a hitch. The sizable crowd on hand represented a growing segment of Africa’s biggest city: working-class residents with some cash in hand. Mechanics, taxi drivers and factory workers, lifted by a growing economy, have boosted the fortunes of ram fighting. While the rest of Nigeria depends almost wholly on oil, Lagos has a vibrant informal economy that has helped the city post consistent growth rates.

“Things are improving,” said the satisfied founder of the Ram Lovers Association, Bashir Agusto.

Ram fighting—which is also popular in Indonesia, China and Algeria—isn’t nearly as violent as dog and cock fighting. Little blood is spilled, and the rams don’t duel to the death. Fights are usually limited to 50 blows before they are called off, though in the finals the limit is lifted.

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Text Messaging Will Enable Consumers to Check Authenticity; Spate of Fatalities Included Antifreeze-Laced Cough Syrup

LAGOS, Nigeria—Biofem Pharmaceuticals Ltd., a Nigerian medicine distributor, wanted to arrest a slide in sales after a counterfeit ring targeted its best-selling drug. Sproxil Inc., a start-up founded by a Ghana-born Ph.D. student at Dartmouth, promised to do what Nigerian authorities could not: help companies and consumers detect fake pharmaceuticals.

Sproxil’s founder, 28-year old Ashifi Gogo, overcame initial skepticism and a lack of funding to persuade investors to back a technology that offers a quick counterfeit-drug test. The technology could pave the way for wary foreign drug makers to enter the huge African market. The market includes Nigeria, Africa’s biggest country by population but one rife with scams and scamsters.

“Initially it was challenging because venture capitalists run for the hills when they hear Nigeria,” Mr. Gogo said in a telephone interview. “They don’t even care if you’re making gold.”

The company has developed technology that allows customers to use their mobile phones to check on newly purchased drugs. Using scratch-off labels and ID numbers, customers can send a code via text message to a database in the U.S. to check whether the medicine they purchased is authentic. Nigeria is Africa’s biggest mobile-phone market, with more than 70 million users.

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By Will Connors and Spencer Swartz

LAGOS, Nigeria — A high-profile government amnesty program aimed at stopping militants in Nigeria’s oil-rich delta region from bombing pipelines is coming under fire for not seeking permanent solutions to the area’s underlying problems.

The amnesty program, scheduled to begin Thursday and run two months, is the biggest public effort yet by President Umaru Yar’Adua to ease the unrest in the Niger Delta that has cost the country billions of dollars in lost oil revenue.

But Nigerian state governors, analysts, and the militants themselves have criticized the plan because it does little to address the core causes of the militancy and criminality that have plagued the Niger Delta for decades, such as the lack of education, jobs and basic services.

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Nigeria’s movie industry is winning global attention, but DVD piracy may bring it down

LAGOS, Nigeria — Producer Paul Julius is confident that the tens of thousands of dollars he has spent producing the soap opera “Tomorrow’s Tears” will be recouped, no matter the electricity shortages, lack of investors or grease-palmed government officials hampering his shooting schedule.

Fighting to be heard over a steady stream of traffic and actors complaining about the lack of food, money and air conditioning, Mr. Julius explained the plot of his soap, which he hopes to sell to local TV stations. “I changed the subject from the normal stuff: blood, magic, stepmothers, etc.,” he said. “This is going to be about real-life issues.”

Mr. Julius is an up-and-coming player in Nigeria’s film and television industry, known as Nollywood, which has grown from its infancy in the 1980s into the one of the world’s biggest movie industries, but is facing some real-life issues of its own.

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Part 5 of 5 of my series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Did you ever wonder what happened to that clunky 12-inch television you used to watch Seinfeld on? Or to that old CD player you wore out in the ’90s listening to Pearl Jam and P.M. Dawn? There’s a decent chance it ended up here, on the western outskirts of Lagos, in West Africa’s biggest electronics market, Alaba International.

Franklin Azubuike wants you to know that your old appliances are doing fine. And, by the way, thank you.

According to Azubuike, public affairs officer for the Alaba secretariat, the market’s 3,000 shops sell “anything electronic within the imagination of any man” to more than 300,000 people every single day. During the holiday season, the numbers are much, much higher.

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Part 4 of 5 of my series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Lunch hour in downtown Lagos. Bankers and secretaries stream out of their offices toward fast-food joints with names like Mr. Biggs, Tastee Fried Chicken, and Tantalizers. Others hustle toward food stands overseen by women with powerful forearms.

I sit on a rickety wooden bench at one of the stalls, waiting for a waitress to bring me a soda water and spicy jollof rice.

A few men chat nearby. They’ve kept their suit jackets on despite the midday sun, and they aren’t sweating. Their shirts and pants are crisp and clean. They are sporting cufflinks, and pocket squares, and tie bars. They laugh and nudge each other when a group of young women enters the food stall to order pounded yams. The women look them up and down and give slight, approving grins: The men are well-put-together; they deserve smiles.

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Part 3 of 5 of my series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Leo Igwe is a lonely man. In this overwhelmingly religious country, he is a rare creature. Leo is a proud, “out,” practicing atheist.

This is no small feat in a country where people answer the question, “How are you?” with, “I thank God.” Leo’s outspokenness has made him well-known but largely disliked in his home town on the northern outskirts of Lagos. It has also put his life in danger.

“I get death threats all the time,” Leo told me when I first met him several months ago. “What can I do? I believe what I believe.”

Death threats over religious matters are taken seriously in Nigeria, a country with a long and troubled history of religious violence. Particularly in the country’s “middle belt,” between its predominantly Muslim north and mostly Christian south, religious violence is easily triggered and dangerously volatile.

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Part 2 of 5 of my series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Taye paddles us between the stilt-borne homes. Women glide by in canoes on their way to the market, men on their way to sea. Small children paddle themselves to school. They look at me warily, and I try to return their gaze, but my eyes still sting. The smoke from the cars grinding their way across the 7-mile-long bridge toward the city center has crept across the lagoon and gotten into my clothes, nose, and eyes.

It is morning in Makoko, a slum neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, built above lagoon water fetid with pollution and industrial and human waste. Men and women fish from dugout canoes as they have done for centuries. They also have two or three cell phones, each from a different service provider, which they use according to which mobile network is functioning best that day.

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Growth Continues, With or Without a Plan

part 1 of my 5-part series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Bar Beach wakes up later than the rest of Lagos. The prostitutes, touts, and religious devotees who live here on the breakwaters of the Atlantic Ocean emerge from their small shacks or from underneath tarps after the rest of the city has already begun its daily hustle. They had a late night.

Jutting up against the shoreline is a long concrete sea wall, similar in color, shape, and seeming disdain for aesthetics to Chicago’s south side Promontory Point revetment, with hundreds of tractor-tire-sized X-blocks meant to protect the nearby high-priced real estate. On a recent morning, I walked down the sea wall as men, women, and children appeared from behind the X-blocks, taking pulls from small brown bottles, smoking joints, or picking at their teeth with bits of plastic.

A few city employees were bent over, sweeping the causeway of dirt. Beside them was a sign that read, “Eko o ni baje!” Yoruba for “Don’t spoil Lagos.” The signs are posted all over the city. Few heed them, from the state minister driving by in his Bentley to the tattered guy next to me drinking his breakfast.

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