Nigerian shoppers rule!

Visitors from the west African nation are the UK’s fourth biggest foreign spenders, ringing up an average £500 in each shop where they make purchases – four times what the average UK shopper spends. Middle class Nigerians holidaying or visiting relatives abroad have been increasing, with those UK-bound hiking by more than 50% to 142,000 a year in the decade ending 2011. In a country projected to become Africa’s biggest economy next year, and the world’s fifth most populous by 2050, businesses at home and abroad are cashing in. In Debenhams’ Oxford Street branch, a signage is in Hausa, one of the official Nigerian languages in the country’s largely impoverished north. It said that Nigerian customers were its biggest overseas spenders. Daily flights plying the lucrative route between Nigeria and the UK have ballooned in the last decade. British Airways permits almost double the normal baggage allowance for the 6-hour haul.

Read more on The Guardian.