The story is told of one contributor at the US Congress, who forced his colleagues to listen to him, barring interruptions with the curt retort, “I speak for posterity.”

Exasperated by his winding contributions, another contributor, who managed to slip in a word remarked: “The way you are going, posterity will meet us here.”

Posterity is too important for us to interrupt any efforts invested in it. It deserves dedicated attention. Unfortunately, we look at the future with our eyes in the past, believing that we are making progress.

For as long as Nigeria thinks of its plan for a matter of years, and remains unable to meet its needs beyond a couple of years, the country is in dire danger of not having a future.

Nigeria has no enduring plans. Two supposed bold efforts at forecasting and acting to benefit from the future are still born. Vision 202020 was one of them. Under it, Nigeria envisioned being among the top 20 global economies by year 2020.

The work on the vision document was completed two years ago, its key performance indicators on the short term have been missed. Foundations for milestones that should have been met by 2012 have not been erected.

Electricity, as everyone seems to know, was rated an important factor in Nigeria’s development. Recommendations in the vision document about alternative sources of energy and how unmet energy needs, on the short-term, would hamper development, have become materials for speeches — nothing more.

Only eight years to the end of the vision period, we are staggering under the burden of inability to plan for more than a day. We cannot articulate tomorrow.

We speculate our needs. We are not even sure how many we are, how many we will be and Nigerians will live by 2030, for instance.

Every task is executed for the survival of every administration’s tenure. The biggest attention to the future is a succession plan, one to ensure that whoever is in office today, has an anointed lackey, who would continue the plan to make parts of Nigeria fiefdoms of those who attain political power.

Legislation in the past 12 years concentrated on sustaining interests of power mongers. We can amend the Constitution in quick successions to see elections through, but we cannot provide for health, education, or infrastructure with the same haste.

Another strong signal that we have disdain for the future is the wrangling over the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Those who deem it an affront on fiscal imperatives of the Constitution, fail to suggest ways of redeeming the defects. Their concerns are with “sharing the money” to meet today’s needs, essentially paying salaries of public workers.

If Nigeria continues to wobble into the future in this manner less form, it is guaranteed a tortured existence and its peoples would remain uncompetitive in a global community that ranks contributions on stiff competitive terms.

Again, we ask, who speaks for posterity? Is posterity important or are we only a country content to plan for its peoples for a few years.

Without a firm grasp of our future, and what we can do to enhance it, we are doomed to perpetual under-development and the attendant challenges of poverty of body and mind, in a form worse than anything we are currently experiencing.