and a new pilot/engineer is born.

OK. Maybe you are right. Some of us will have to arrange a trip to
Nigeria to verify it. You go ahead, I can't afford it.

Not worth my time. The burden of proof for a claim like this is on the
person making the claim, not the person reading about the claim. How
hard can it be for Muhammed to have a friend take a picture of the
contraption in flight? Not as hard as making it fly, I presume.

So where is this evidence that it is a hoax?

Lack of credulity on my part:

1) Failure to show the aircraft in flight.
2) No valid source exists for the news as reported by the blogs. The
"Yahoo" link is bogus. The "raw feed" link is merely another blog.
3) The craft looks like it can't fly for various reasons.
4) It was built from junk in 8 months of spare time. He found all
these parts in a junk yard and made them work together for controlled
helicopter flight in eight months -- but only in his SPARE TIME. Hmm.
Must have a lot of that spare time and some damned fine junk yards at
his disposal.
5) No machining required. Apparently he didn't have to machine
ANYTHING for a completely custom, one-off vehicle. Or does he have
lathes and other machine tooling stuff at his ready disposal? Welders,
sheet metal manipulating equipment, digital equipment and interfaces
to make the "joystick" work as a controller. That stuff takes time.
More time than 8 months of spare time.

And you know, he's never done anything like this before!

This would be an amazing, and very unlikely, job to pull off ANYWHERE
in the world.

Lets see this logic. If a report is from the western world it is
assumed true (innocent until proven guilty). If a report is from
Nigeria (and some other places) than it is assumed to be a hoax
(guilty, of anything we want to assume, until proven innocent).

It has nothing to do with location in my opinion. If that contraption
were in my neighbor's backyard here in "the western world" and he
said, "hey, it flies. It flies up to 7 feet in the air," I'd say
"great, let's see it."

It has to do with lack of evidence that flight was ever performed in
the unique device pictured in a single picture only SITTING FIRMLY ON
THE GROUND.

The burden is not on me to prove that it can fly or that it can't.
It's at least possible I think, so, let's see it. Is it too much to
ask to see more pictures before you believe a story like this?