“If fuel subsidy removal is going to be your opening gambit in this complex game of economic-chess, you might as well return to your desk at the World Bank.” Dele Sobowale, August, 20II. Advice given to Dr Okonjo-Iweala.

“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide full employment and its arbitrary and ineuitable distribution of wealth and incomes”. John Maynard Keynes, 883-946, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Published in 936.

To this, Albert Camus,1903-1960, Algeria born French philosopher and Nobel Prize Winner, in Return to Tipasa, added. “It is a mistake, almost often punished to return to a place one once loved and hope to regain the same ardour.” Madam Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Finance, is like a “fish out of water; flapping on the pier.”

Even, when some of the broad outlines of history appear to repeat themselves, on the whole nothing remains the same. Mankind has been repeating many errors made in the past since recorded history. Africans are the most backward people on earth because we hardly wrote our own history. We waited for Europeans to start writing our history for us. And, now in Nigeria, history has been removed from the school curriculum. That will guarantee that future generations will fall into the same traps as we.

I want to extend my greatest gratitude to Captain Roosa for caring about Nigeria more than our leaders apparently do. I don’t cry over rubber because it represents several opportunities lost in this country. In my short span of life, I have been closely associated with at least four crops – two food and two cash crops – which if grown to the limit of our collective abilities could make our squabble over crude oil revenue disappear.