BY SUNNY IKHIOYA

IF there is one thing everyone is agreed on, with respect to Nigeria, it is that we have a great pool of human and natural resources. If so, why can’t these advantages be translated into a blessing for the country? That is where the agreement ends and the beginning of the discordant notes we have been hearing since the country was given the opportunity to govern itself.

Some have argued that we have not had a leadership with a proper grasp of the complexity of this nation, that possesses the political will to correct the distortions put in place by the British colonial government and subsequent military coup plotters that forced their way to power. 

Others have said that, the people have been too passive and timidly brainwashed into their cocoons of ethnicity and religion, which have given successive political leaders the leeway or opportunities to under-perform and pass blames elsewhere. It has got to the extent that our leaders are now going round the world, appropriating reasons for the challenges of other nations and ascribing them to our inability to get our bearings right. Today, they are busy blaming or attributing our woes to globalisation, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. But are these really the reasons why our country is going into recession now? 

With the array of experts and professionals that we have in government, can we really beat our chest and say that these factors are indeed the real causes of Nigeria’s problems? I have always aligned myself to the school of thought that encourages man to find solutions, rather than finding faults. It is worse when you are doing this from the position of leadership as it blinds one to the critical aspect of problem solving.

Excuses do not get you result; when you continue to find excuses for your failures, the problem persists and I believe that is where we are losing it. There has never been one directional angle to governance; there has always been, from time, the other opinion; what some people see as criticism. 

When your path is not leading the people to their desired destination, there is a need to look at the opinion of others, without seeing them as enemies. You do not need to be an economic expert to know that the solutions to our problem are simple enough to discern, even when government is toeing other paths.

For example: you have anchored the future growth and development of this country on productive agriculture and invested heavily through different assumed programmes to promote agriculture and farmers activities. At the same time, you have watched helplessly as farmlands are destroyed across the land by rampaging bandits and herders. How do you think that your agricultural programmes will yield dividends? 

Some of us have attracted direct foreign investment into cooperative farming these past years and gotten our fingers burnt; meanwhile, our spokespersons will be saying that we are making tremendous progress in the agriculture sector.

The simple solution is to keep the farms safe for the farmers to generate farm produce, which will enable the nation to feed itself. If our farmers are not allowed to farm in their lands, how will the country feed itself? Now, we are saying that the Russia-Ukraine war is the cause of the food crises in our land. When the bandits were running riot in our farmlands, we were fiddling like Emperor Nero of Rome; we are now realising so late that these people have to be flushed out of the land.

Why do we have to wait this long? Why does it appear like we have treated these people with kid gloves? Over the years, how many have been successfully prosecuted amongst the ones caught? Now we are blaming others for the lack of food in our land and some people will agree that is the cause.

The country has depended on one product for over five decades. Even though we know how important this is to our collective existence, yet we allowed pirates and official thieves to play havoc with this important product. Today, states cannot share out of the proceeds of oil money; we are spending more than we are generating because people are stealing the oil money.

Who are these people stealing the oil? Whose responsibility is it to bring the culprits to book? How many officials have been sanctioned for negligence with respect to this? They will tell you that the situation is global, that Nigeria is not different. They are going about now harassing innocent businesses for tax, forcing some of them out of business; yet, you have not provided the necessary infrastructure to keep the businesses going.

Our situation is simple: plug the leaking holes and see what we can generate from there; if it’s not enough, we can look at other ingenious ways to produce or generate resources. We have no business to be in the league of countries suffering because God has blessed this country. Go to our forests, you will find foreigners digging deep, with the help of locals, searching for minerals and precious stones that they will take out of the country; we do not have control of these activities. Meanwhile, vital foreign exchange earnings are taken out of the country.

You cannot sow cocoyam and harvest corn. Look at the structure of the NNPC today; check out the leadership, all skewed towards a section of the country; they do not care for the indigenes of the land, not even the landowners of these resources, and you want to run the oil business in peace without disruptions.

Common sense dictates that you treat the indigenes fairly, especially in the allocation of leadership to the top; you cannot handle the people better than those that own the land. But because you want to prove that you are the one incharge of government, you take whatever decision you like. The result is what you are seeing now in the NNPC and other federal establishments like it.

We can never make any headway, without instituting the principles of true federalism. The ways of war are changing, it is not usually the most populated or biggest, in terms of armoury, that wins the war. Today’s warfare is more about intelligence and technology, assigning all the top positions of our military architecture, to one section of the country has not helped us, it has, on the other hand, exposed us to the fact that sectionalising our military will only bring this nation down.