By BENOIT FAUCON, MARGARET COKER and WILL CONNORS

Dubai police have arrested a former Nigerian governor fleeing corruption charges, officials said Thursday, as authorities prepare to take the rare step of extraditing him to the U.K.

James Ibori, the former governor of oil-rich Delta State in southern Nigeria, was arrested in Dubai shortly after arriving there earlier this week, according to Dubai and London police as well as Nigerian antigraft officials.

Interpol—an international police organization—sent out an alert for Mr. Ibori’s arrest before he was picked up. An Interpol spokeswoman referred calls to the Dubai police.

“He was trying to pass through Dubai, but we stopped him,” a Dubai police official said. Dubai police officials confiscated Mr. Ibori’s passport and jailed him, the official said. Judicial authorities in Dubai are currently completing paperwork informing Interpol and the U.K. authorities about the arrest. “We are ready to extradite him,” the official said.

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By Jonathan Weisman and Will Connors

ACCRA, Ghana — The first African-American president came to the continent of his father to exhort Africans on Saturday to rid themselves of corruption, embrace democracy and move from the grand, often violent, struggles of liberation and tribalism to the quieter, more potent movement of stability and economic growth.

In a half-hour speech described as a major foreign policy address, U.S. President Barack Obama stood before Ghana’s boisterous parliament, with a backdrop of festive kente cloth and adoring crowds cheering outside. The speech was broadcast on radio stations throughout the continent.

U.S. embassies in Africa held watch parties, movie theaters carried it live and what Internet access there is in Africa crackled with Twitter feeds and e-mailed snippets. The message was one that perhaps only Mr. Obama could have delivered: Africa’s excuses are over. Africans must lift themselves up.

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(photo: AP)

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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LAGOS, Nigeria — This country is trying to remake its international image. Again.

The oil-rich but shaky West African government this week launched a $1 million public-relations blitz to lure tourists and foreign investors and combat what officials say is an outdated depiction of Nigeria and its citizens as hopelessly corrupt.

It’s a tough sell. Africa’s most populous nation has become synonymous with government graft, email scams and drug smuggling. By some estimates, nearly $400 billion in oil revenues was stolen between 1960 and 1999. Former military ruler Sani Abacha alone stole roughly $4 billion over the span of his brutal five-year reign in the 1990s.

Recently, Nigeria has come to be associated with the international drug trade — both as a transit point and as a source of traffickers. On Wednesday, officials in Beijing arrested a Nigerian man they said was carrying nearly 200 pounds of marijuana in his luggage, China Daily reported.

With that sort of publicity to deal with, Information Minister Dora Akunyili unveiled Nigeria’s newest PR counterattack: “Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation.”

“We must shed this toga that says we are untrustworthy, unreliable and ungovernable,” Ms. Akunyili told reporters in the capital, Abuja. Previous efforts to repair the country’s reputation have been largely unsuccessful. The most recent international campaign, “Nigeria: Heart of Africa,” featuring a bikini-clad model, was scrapped last year after officials spent $7 million.

This week’s campaign didn’t get off to an auspicious start. At the news conference announcing the new campaign, one of the members of the re-branding committee, Isawa Elaigwa, told reporters he’d just been pick-pocketed. The thieves got his cellphone.

see the story at the Wall Street Journal online here