NIGERIA@53, The country is endowed with abundant natural resources and brilliant human capital. Yet, the paradox is there is widespread poverty due to misused resources and untapped potentials. It is therefore true that wherever Nigeria is mentioned, what comes to mind is Boko Haram, oil theft, kidnapping and corruption. Nigeria also lags behind on every world index that signifies progress and development. Our lives are daily deteriorating in a frightening way......RIBADU IN DAILYTRUST. .... This is not to give in to pessimism, I strongly disagree with those writing off Nigeria as a failed country. Agreed, we could do a lot better based on what we have in terms of natural resources and demographic advantages. Nigeria stands on a foundation built by our founding fathers who in their wisdom also salvaged and formed a stack of bricks with which we are to build the nation up. But the generations following our founding fathers used those bricks only to form ever more insidious fences that divide us across the lines of ethnicities, regions and religions. Nigeria’s problems have been shifted from the actual, which is the collapse of our institutions after many years of military, political and bureaucratic imprudence, to an invented assumption which suggests that our peoples are unwilling to live together. The foundation of this country, contrary to whatever is schemed to uproot it, can only be understood when you go round the country and interact with the larger masses, who are the actual patriots, from markets to schools, and to social gatherings where identifications are based only on individualities. Our people are bound by a common goal, the desire to have their lives improved. They are united in the same struggle to have functional public and private institutions because their sufferings, their poverty and deprivations, have neither ethnic nor religious identities. And the exclusive sufferings amongst them, like insecurity as a result of religious and ethnic differences, can as well be traced to our politics and ill-advised political decisions and indecisions. Nigeria: From Pyramids to Refineries Before oil, there were groundnuts and cereals from the north, cocoa, timber and palm produce from the south forming the core of an agrarian economy. I’m always fascinated by what the FirstRepublic politicians achieved with revenues derived from the agricultural sector. It is indeed ironic that the major institutions in the country today were executed by proceeds of our agrarian economy. It’s inspiring that with meager budgets, those committed leaders built the legacies we have not with the trillions we’ve earned from the Oil sector. Those first sets of leaders are inspirations that what Nigeria needs today is actually not more money, but simply the will and wisdom for the contemporary leaders, many of whom parade themselves as political protégés of the FirstRepublic pragmatic leaders, to learn the art of true leadership. The disappearance of those Kano pyramids and subsequent ban on exportation of cash crops by successive government are the beginning of our economic chaos, especially as our GDP of which agriculture used to account for over 60 percent, declined as a result of distraction to the prospects of the petroleum industry. Worse still, the oil industry has not received the needed attention that could boost its capacity to augment the decline in agriculture. The situation was further exacerbated by endemic corruption in the system, rendering all the oil wealth meaningless to the man on the streets. Over-dependence on Oil means economic vulnerability in times of unstable oil markets and our financial recklessness and inability to conduct simple policy forecasts as we neglected the non-oil sector had our economy grounded until we were ranked a low-income country in 1988, qualifying for aid alongside countries like Zambia, India, China, Pakistan and Ghana. But, has that taught us a lesson? Our economy failed not exactly because we embarked on extravagant spending in a bid to modernise Nigeria but squarely because we lacked functional institutions where discipline, justice and selfless service are extolled. Our economy failed simply because the institutions were hijacked by public officers more concerned with their personal welfares than in the development of the nation. IN RIBADU. CONGRATULATION NIGERIANS.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 08:21:35 +0000
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