The Honorable Dino Melaye, Nigeria’s House of Representatives’ committee chairman on Information and National Orientation, has recently revealed that the sales of a local company, the Delta Steel Company, of Ovwian-Aladja in the Delta State, to a company from India was fraudulent. The sale was conducted by the country’s Bureau of Public Enterprises. Moreover, Melaye added that companies hailing from Australia and Russia recently visited Nigeria in order to value the Ajaokuta Steel Company; the company from India also bought the Ajaoukuta Steel Company, and the Bureau of Public Enterprises also undervalued it.

Melaye revealed all this as a result of a private investigation which he had conducted regarding the work of Global Infrastructure Nigeria Limited (or GINL) as it bought the Delta Steel Company. Through his investigation, Melaye found that the GINL had emerged as the highest bidder for the Delta Steel Company despite the fact that the GINL had not even participated in the bidding.

Truly, private investigation is more than just following people around in order to discover if they are being faithful to their spouses or significant others, or combing the streets and alleys in the search of a missing child. Private investigation can be as low profile and as secretive as someone handing over a suitcase of money in order to find out if a person if duping a family out of its inheritance; or it can be as complex and as high profile as the case presented above, where a government official accuses a bureau of participating in fraudulent activity.

In the United States, private investigation may also require knowledge of computers, in order to best search through databases; accounting, in order to find out if a company’s auditing work is truthful; and of course, some extent of self-defense, in order to protect oneself against the less civilized elements of society. According to government statistics  private investigators hail from such fields as insurance, accounting, the military and intelligence, and law enforcement. Of the fifty-two thousand private investigators licensed to work in 2006, a little over a third were working in investigation and security services.

If you are interested in working as a private investigator, you will need to make yourself ready for irregular work hours, dangerous work, and even tedious days spent trailing people and keeping a low profile. Moreover, you may need to study a field relevant to your intended specialty. For instance, if you want to do work on computers, you will need a computer science background; if you intend to work with larger companies that want to look at records and financial fraud, you need to have a background in accountancy.

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