CELEBRATION

Do you not think sometimes that we are part of some lavish joke? Nigeria is 53 and January 2014 will mark a century of our amalgamation. But how much have we done in building the nation we are celebrating? Is there anything to celebrate?

Our leaders’ anniversary gift to us is a corrupt polarized society with politicians desperate to cling to power and lazy Nigerians who refuse to take responsibility. Last week, over 50 students were slaughtered in Yobe State. In fact, the North East of the country is a war zone and in the Niger Delta, militants are being held at bay with bribes. Are we losing our nation?

We live in a state of perpetual repression, not because we do not know the truth, but because we are uneducated, lazy and in denial.  We talk about how richly endowed this country is but what have we done with it? We should be ashamed that we have so much solid minerals and agricultural resources yet have to import these same finished products from abroad. Lead poisoning is killing children in Zamfara due to illegal gold mining because government has refused to invest in that resource for national development.  Our people are slaves to smugglers and our collective benefit is stolen.  Illegal refineries have sprung up in the creeks because the nation lacks the capacity to create an enabling environment for investors to come here and service our petroleum needs. They pollute the land and the water and our children die and yet no benefit accrues to us. It is a joke that a country with 23 billion barrels of oil and 160 trillion cubic meters of gas in its reserves does not know how to efficiently generate energy, give the local communities ownership and create wealth for the nation.   

We have a total of 37 minerals in commercial quantity in Nigeria. Kogi State alone has deposits of a total of 29, yet it is one of the poorest states here. Nigeria’s bitumen deposit, put at 42 billion tones (almost twice the volume of our crude oil), is the second largest in the world.  Not to have railways and to be struggling with some of the world’s poorest road networks is unbelievable. With over 600 million tones of low-content sulphur and ash coal, we shut our eyes on one of the best sources of energy and fluctuate between 3000-4000MW of epileptic electricity supply nationwide. We have barite, gypsum, gold, iron ore, lead, zinc, kaolin and gemstones in commercial quantity.

We should have the rest of the world pounding on our doors and begging us to let them also have a piece of the action. Yet no. Why? Because we are not ready to do what it takes. Instead they laugh at us.

With 167 million people, we are one of the very few countries blessed with the rarity of having both resources and population to feed the market potential. We have what to produce and the people to consume it. Can you imagine? This is what businesses all over the world are looking for. Enugu has enough coal to power Nigeria for 400 years; Kogi has enough limestone to keep three of Obajana Cement Factory in business for 100 years; we have twice more bitumen in Ondo than crude oil. And there is no state of the federation without at least one form of mineral resource. But failure to harness these mineral resources is responsible for a similar failure in the agric and allied sector. Cotton production has dwindled because our textiles are closed. We now sell raw cotton to India and Bangladesh to help provide jobs for their people; our cocoa bean is rejected in the international market for lacking in quality; the famous groundnut pyramids in Kano are now merely remembered with fondness; and we now look to Malaysia for the cooking oil we were famous for in the 50s and 60s.   

Rather than rolling out the drums to party as usual, we should, as Socrates said, “employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.”  That means that it CANNOT be political for our schools to be closed because “true wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves and the world around us.” The quest for knowledge should be paramount in our minds.

Power, water, rail and road networks and communication must be priorities.  Industries cannot run efficiently otherwise, our youth will not be trained and engaged and we will continue to run down the road to polarity, balkanization pain and suffering. We need to start to understand the world. It does not have to be such a painful journey. God bless Nigeria.