Nigerian entrepreneurs petition PayPal to enter country

Frustrated with the ridiculous complexity of trying to buy something online? Hate having to order something then arrange a electronic payment from your bank separately? Would you like the peace of mind that of an easy to-use-escrow service that helps to weed out dodgy online traders by not paying them until you’re satisfied with the goods received?

You’re not alone.

“Bring PayPal to Nigeria.” That’s the rallying call of a group of Nigerian entrepreneurs who are calling on PayPal CEO Scott Thompson to get his company into the country in order to make business and ecommerce easier for locals.

The petition was set up on Change.org by a group of younger web designers running a company called Creativity Kills, who say it’s unfair to leave Nigeria out from using the online payment gateway. PayPal is currently available in 47 other countries in Africa, including South Africa.

Here are a few paragraphs from the petition.

Nigeria is the largest economy in Africa with millions of dollars in e-commerce potential and Nigerians that want to take part in online transactions cannot fully use PayPal which is accepted as the only payment method on some websites.

This has become a source of frustration for us the Legit people who want to carry out ecommerce online but have no access to this feature. Some have defaulted to hood-winking the PayPal system via proxies, we don’t want to any more!

We have the right to carry out online transactions as much as any other country in the world. Granted, Nigeria is known for internet fraud, but not everyone in Nigeria is a fraud. There are people like us who are talented web developers and gurus. I don’t see why we have to suffer for other peoples actions.

We deserve a shot, we are tired of being ostracized by PayPal!

According to the petition, PayPal could bring the service to Nigeria by partnering with local service such as Interswitch, Paga or GTBank. “These are possible scenarios that are better than locking a country out totally”.

Bring PayPal to Nigeria has 391 signatures so far, with 109 more needed to reach its 500 signature goal.

Source: Human IPO