Donald Trump, the newly
elected president of the United States of America, at one of his election campaigns had
this to say about Nigerians “look at countries like Nigeria or Kenya
for instance, those people are stealing from their own government and go to
invest the money in foreign countries. From the government to the
opposition, they only qualify to be used as a case study whenever bad examples
are required. How do you trust even those who have run away to hide here in the
United States, hiding behind education? I hear they abuse me in their blogs but
I don’t care because even the internet they are using is ours and we can decide
to switch it off from this side. These are people who import everything
including matchsticks. In my opinion, most of these African countries ought to
be recolonized again for another 100 years because they know nothing about
leadership and self-governance.” Checking all the sentences in
this speech, the average Nigerian home and abroad hurts bitterly. But please let’s
question each of these sentences and you will find that many of them are true
even as I do not agree that we need to be recolonized. There is just a
particular systemic clique that is causing problem in Nigeria which the 170m
people in this country cannot touch. Even the law cannot touch them.
 |
| Donald Trump, Incoming President of the United States |
As
of November 2016 the population of the United States of America is 325.00m .
The population of Nigerians residing in the United States is about 300,000 and
the population of Americans living in Nigeria is about 30, 000. Nigerian
students are the highest number of African students in the US. Nigeria has the
highest population of immigrants of African descent but please note too that
Nigeria has the largest population in Africa of about 170m people. The
United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did estimate that 11.4
million unauthorized immigrants live in the United States as at January 2012.
The difference is while there are some 3m illegal African immigrants in the US,
there may be no illegal American immigrant in Nigeria. Hence Nigeria is truly
an immigration burden to the United States. Amidst this musing, I have asked
myself why we feel exactly that NAIJAEXIT will not happen one-day, when just
some 3 decades ago, we, though more subtly, did same to Ghana. The thoughts of
the story of Ghana-must-go bags, the immigration, emigration of Ghanaians into
and out of Nigeria in 1980s and the state of that country today sparked off a
more brutal resolution in me.
Leadership is a major
problem in Nigeria as it is the permeable membrane that tolerates importation,
corruption, unemployment and poor governance as Trump stated. It is in
Nigeria that corrupt people have more crowd than truthful people. It is in
Nigeria that it is so difficult to put a thief in prison. Thank God for Buhari
and these Aba-made shoes. It is Nigeria that imports for consumption what
it abundantly has. Infact amidst the 10 largest oil producers in the world,
Nigeria is the only country importing her own resources to consume. It is in
Nigeria that Innosson will be making cars as a Nigerian brand and it will not
be declared the government’s official vehicle. It is in Nigeria that Nollywood
will attain such great global heights and will still be having those structural
issues. It is in Nigeria that thieves have so many defenders.
It is always very
painful to recall that there are very incorruptible people in this country that
you never get to know of. I mean people you can get into serious people trying
to bribe them. Until someone presented Professor Dora Akunyili to President
Olusegun Obasanjo, no one ever believed a lady like that could do such a job.
Nigeria has so many hardworking, incorruptible people that are never
celebrated! We may be seen as corrupt but many citizens of these developed
nations are very corrupt too. The difference is these countries developed a
system that makes involvement in corruption and crimes a costly decision. We
have had multinationals involved in corruption in Nigeria. We have the finest
hands trained abroad do corrupt practices here. In some developed nations,
power failures cannot even happen for 1 hour without door to door lootings. In
the midst of hurricanes and earthquakes when the nation is mourning, many are
busy looting freshly collapsed malls. This just teaches us all that there are
just good and bad people everywhere but these developed countries keep bad
people in prison and celebrate to elevate good people. Simple!
With this shame, it is
so glaring that Nigeria must emerge and there must be no war. If there is,
Ghana might run to Nigeria in the 1980s but no country in the entire West
African coast can contain us. If we enter their academics, we will fill their
classes. We will take their jobs and acquire their houses. This country just
has to work. Nigeria needs young people that cannot be corrupted and we have them. We need professionals who know their onions that will
crush this nonsense. We need intelligence to check these politicians, this
police, this judiciary and this entire system. Thieves must get their blue
uniforms and hardworking people must succeed. No country in the world has
collapsed without crude oil proceeds hence Nigeria cannot be an exception.
America is looking more for job creators that will help solve her unemployment
problems .So should we be doing.
But I know Nigeria. As
corrupt as it is being perceived, never ever allow her come to a conclusion
that you are her common enemy. It will stretch close to death to stay alive to
prove a point. Remember the story of a foreign commentator that said Nigerians
are apes in 1996. Remember that Nigeria rose to that call on the final day.
Nigeria identified Ebola in 2014 as a heartless enemy ready to obliterate her
from human existence. We all know how it ended. On the day the Nigerian Police,
the Nigerian executive and the Nigerian judiciary largely and finally
agree that corruption, poor governance and importation are clearly marked out
as her lead enemy, corruption will present itself in its safest format and no
one will move close because the consequence will be colossal. Even of products with
very low comparative advantage, you will ask and re-ask CBN before you ever
attempt to import. Those days of seamless judgments are less by one today!
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