Few days ago, President Bola Tinubu was in Germany, to attend an investors summit, where he told among other things that he wants his name included in the Guinness Book of Records for doing what successive leaders in the country couldn’t do, introduction of economic reforms. “If they won’t do it, I will strive my way into it because I deserve it,” our dear President said.
The other thing he said was to plead to investors to come and invest in the country. He explained to them the country has the best terms for their investments, manpower, ready market and favorable policies for repatriation of profits. He said so many other things but two form the crux of today›s discourse for the simple reason that they raise for the critical minds strong concerns about the our development trajectory.
What is our vision about our country? What have we chosen as the pathway(s) to our vision? If any exist, was it a product of general agreement? If we have a vision it is possible our leaders won›t find any good reason to hop into a plane and fly to various nations to attend seminars and to beg investors to come into the country. Visions where they exist contain in-built processes for realizing them, oftentimes the major momentum comes from inside not from outside.
By now the message ought to have sunk deep into our leaders and of course the rest of us that it is very shameful to find a President spending two days outside his country, moreso attending a seminar organized by one innocuous group. Before going to Germany, in recent weeks our President was in Saudi Arabia to beg for financial aid. Saudi Arabia of all places. Like us, Saudi Arabia has crude oil, we are both near mates in terms of nationhood.
The difference is while we got the money and allowed individuals and groups to steal it, the Saudis had the good judgment to engage in proper investment. So while they grew and became very prosperous, we on the other hand, grew disorderly, very dislocated, emasculated and very poor. Today we have turned into a beggarly nation. Hunger has killed shame, this isn’t the case. How come Nigeria, giant of Africa, will be on her knees pleading with Saudi Arabia to give us a lifeline and they in turn give us conditionalities that must be met.
They even added insults when their officials turned back Nigerian visitors to that country at the airport without adequate or convincing reasons. We raged but the anger of a beggar who can observe? In Germany, our Presiden opened and emptied himself. Through his remarks, we got to know he belongs to the old school of leadership which believes our salvation will come only from extraneous factors.
He told them our country is down and without foreign capital, we are doomed. This is no good message. People who make themselves worthless hardly receive attention or help. Truly, there is no free launch, it is either one is ready to stand and make the best of what is available or fall and be appropriated. We see the war in Ukraine and now Gaza; the biggest lesson is that vulnerable societies could be wiped away and the world will look away as if nothing terrible is happening.
The next and equally very important would be the points that we have marshaled on this page very vigorously: foreign investors have never developed any country. Rather they are birds of fortune that go to only places where the bread is already buttered. It is folly to go begging them to come, they won’t, except the objective conditions are very favourable by their own standards. Begging them is indicative of a shaky system. They know this. So when the conditions are negative and our leaders are out there begging them, all they do is laugh at our misdirection.
Investors are shrewd business people, they know our power supply is very epileptic. They are aware that our crude is regulated by different forces on the international market, so it will be very difficult to plan. They know we don’t have roads and that insecurity plagues the land on a very terrible scale. Above all, repatriation of profits would never be easy, the president’s promises notwithstanding. The country produces virtually nothing from which it could earn much needed foreign exchange. This is the truth.
When our leaders go abroad to look for investors we should be worried and for obvious reasons. The first is that it amounts to dancing naked in the marketplace. It advertises our penchant to play the ostrich. What the world sees when we do so are people who have become grown in leaving substance to chase shadows. People who major in the minor.
What should jolt us from the seeming state of inertia we have fallen into should be what we see happening to us and around us. A country blessed with all kinds of natural resources and human capital is down and about to go out entirely. This alone should bother us if we still have our minds in place. The other would be that life and living have become nasty and brutish. If we continue the way we are going, in the next 10 years it will be suicidal for anyone to walk the streets without being a victim to barbarism of the worst kind. Already hunger and disease are combining to do inestimable damage to lives and to businesses.
These should worry us. The question would be what should be done? What should be the right path to thread? Let a national healing commence today, not tomorrow. No development would take place under an atmosphere where citizens are angry with themselves and their country. When we leave bonding and begin to emphasize economics it shows we don›t know what our troubles are.
Sense of bonding and the freedom that flows from it lead to economic direction and pursuit. Our resolve will throw up the big lesson that impetus generated from within can produce the kind of development that will propel us into First World status. That is the way to go. All these strategies of waiting for Godot won’t suffice. Rather we will wake up to discover we just wasted all our time chasing shadows. This will be a most painful experience.