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In the face of daunting developmental challenges confronting Nigeria as a nation, new sets of thinking, deep and outside the box, devoid of myths, conspiracy theories or outright fallacies are needed now more than ever before, if pragmatic solutions will be achieved that will set Nigeria on a sure path to progress and prosperity. It has become clear that, with the best of intentions by leaders of government, if the prevailing unrealistic narratives about the endowments and potential of Nigeria, which have become entrenched in the psyche of leaders and the led, are not urgently corrected and put in proper and realistic perspectives, the most populous African nation risks perpetuating the vicious cycle of high expectations from succeeding administrations but disappointments on the part of the citizens on promises not kept and hopes dashed.
Nigeria is not blessed by abundant natural and human resources as popularly believed. No nation on earth is so endowed. That Nigeria is endowed with a number of natural mineral resources in commercially viable quantity should not be mistaken for abundance. Nigeria’s chief mineral export is crude oil, which accounts for about 80 per cent of the country’s total export earnings. Nigeria’s hydrocarbon reserve is conservatively estimated 37.2 billion barrels, with a daily oil production output of 2.28 million barrels per day, making her the 11th largest oil producer in the world. This is where the good news ends.
Nigeria has a large population of about 170 million people (the seventh most populous country in the world). If the considerable volume of Nigeria’s oil production is placed side by side the large size of its population, it becomes evident that Nigeria is only endowed with just enough natural resources that are far from abundant. For example, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with a smaller population of about 28 million people, is the largest oil producer in the world, with a proven reserve 268 billion barrels of crude oil and a daily output of 10.7 million barrels per day. Compared with Saudi Arabia, Nigeria cannot continue to thump its chest as being blessed with abundant natural resources.
This situation is made worse when the modest resources available are frittered away by the kleptomaniac ruling class.
If Nigeria is endowed with just enough natural resources, the same cannot be said of its human resource base. A country whose educational system has been in steep and steady decline since the early 1970s cannot continue to pride itself as having abundant human resources. The low standard of education in Nigeria has taken a negative toll on the overall development of the minds of a larger section of the population, particular those who had the misfortune of being born after Independence.
A population whose business management and public administration skills are severely inadequate, leading to a poorly managed private sector-driven economy and an equally inefficient and wasteful public service is a clear indication of gross inadequacy in human resources. A people whose democratic choices in the political process are dictated more by retrogressive sentiments of ethnicity, religion and filial ties than pragmatic alignment of individual or collective economic interests with their political choices, irrespective of ethnicity, religion or family ties, cannot in all honesty qualify as a formidable human resource base.
A country whose people judge one another by their place of origin, faith and mother tongue, rather than by the content of their character and what they are have to offer, cannot continue to pride itself as having abundant human resources. A nation of no scientific inventors and technological innovators doesn’t qualify as one that is blessed by abundant human resources. The abundance of human resources is measured by the quality and not the quantity of the population.
In the face of these stark realities, it has become important to deepen and expand the discourse about nation-building beyond just how to efficiently manage our natural endowments to the more fundamental issues of how to expand our resource base from being just enough to truly abundant. Similarly, sustainable growth and development depend largely on Nigeria’s ability to shore up its human resource base to effectively drive the process. Nigeria, like other progressive nations of the world, must begin to look beyond its borders for extra sources of natural and material resources. To achieve this major objective, one option immediately open to Nigeria is to re-appraise its foreign policy objectives by making it more pragmatic and realist and less moralist in its engagement with countries that are relatively less developed. While remaining committed in principle to all regional and sub-regional multilateral agreements, Nigeria should begin to evolve more economically beneficial bilateral engagements with willing countries, particularly those within its traditional sphere of influence.
Nigeria should outgrow its dependency on the so-called foreign direct investments (FDIs), which have proved to be exploitative and contribute nothing in real terms to the economy, to becoming an overseas investor nation, beginning with Commonwealth nations of Africa. The entire Nigerian economy revolves around the two million barrels per day oil revenue, with predatory investors investing just enough to get a huge chunk of the meagre resources, which they freely repatriate to their countries of origin in a brazen case of capital flight. Nigeria must exit this pitiable state and join the new scramble for Africa, along with the emerging economies of China, India and other Southeast Asian nations.
Nigeria must explore its influence on brother African nations to secure favourable trade and investment deals for Nigerian businesses to thrive as overseas investors. This will enable Nigerian investors to also repatriate profits back home, which will help greatly in boosting foreign exchange earnings. In this circumstance, Gambia and South Sudan hold a lot of promise for a successful economic voyage overseas for Nigerian business entities. If any lesson was learnt in the last 24 years of Nigeria’s dependence on FDIs, it is the fact that overseas investments are far more profitable than the so-called foreign investments.
Similarly, while government must start investing in quality education to develop the hearts and minds of Nigerians politically and economically as mid and long-term measures aimed at transforming the large quantity that is its population to quality human resource base that has the capabilities to drive the process of sustainable growth and development in line with the vision of economic expansion beyond the borders of Nigeria, in the immediate, a pragmatic immigration policy must be evolved with aims and objectives tailored towards admitting only the best of brains from everywhere around the globe who have the managerial, technological and scientific skills not available in our indigenous population, while shutting our doors tightly against citizens of countries who lack these important skills and hence have nothing to contribute to our progress as a nation. Currently, Nigeria is one big thoroughfare, with citizens, particularly of countries in the West African sub-region, taking full and undue advantage of the free movement treaty to embark on an uncontrolled mass movement into the country but seldom out of the country, thereby further exerting pressure on Nigeria’s meagre resources.
Nigeria’s economic diplomacy in Africa has the potential of uniting the fractious country that it is currently. The exploration of underdeveloped countries on the African continent by getting them to open their economies to Nigerian business entities will go a long way in easing the intense struggle of the various ethno-geographic groupings in the country over the very inadequate natural resources within Nigeria, which has led to entrenched corruption and heightened insecurity.
