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Nine years from now Nigeria will be 50. At 50 Nigeria should still not be
waddling in the marsh of inept leadership, political violence, fiscal
indiscipline, unbridled inflation, inadequate, ill-maintained social
amenities, unemployment, armed robbery, corruption and disease. She should
have left the marsh behind. She should be walking the fresh-smelling, sunlit
meadows of Africa in ebullient resplendence, graceful like a gazelle. She
should have awoken into that nation of our dream – a nation on the cutting
edge of technological development, a nation able to provide for her citizens
the basic necessities for a fulfilled life, and a nation with integrity,
where trust is not scarce.
A nation with integrity is one to whose voice other nations give their ears,
one whose citizens are saved the embarrassment of especial attention at
international airports. At 50 the dream Nigeria should have earned the
attention and respect of the world. She should be able to hold forth her own
in the comity of nations – and this is possible only if those other nations
have come, over time, to appreciate her courage, persistent clarity of
vision, determination, forthrightness, humane motivation, belief in and
defence of justice. The choice of the word ‘earned’ is deliberate. It
underscores the fact that integrity is not a chance occurrence; it is
consciously cultivated. As in a farm, the seeds are sown and carefully
nurtured. Patiently, the farm is watered. Patiently, choking weeds are kept
off, and the fruit can be relished only in the fullness of time. But until
the maturity and the harvesting of the fruit, the labour that goes into the
farmwork is a pure labour of love. So it is with integrity. It is an
accretion; it is its own reward.
The value of integrity is seen in the experience of Atlanta, one of
America’s major cities. According to Mr. Andrew Young, who was for 8 years
the Mayor of Atlanta, unlike Nigeria, the city has minimal resources – if
any; it was built on her integrity and her brain. Because of her unequivocal
integrity the city of Atlanta attracted over 300 manufacturing companies
from Japan. One salubrious effect of this is an enormous amount of traffic
between the city and other administrative and business capitals of the
world. The consequence? Atlanta airport makes more money than Nigeria does
in a year. Such is the value of integrity. This its paradox: sought for
anything else – as a means to an end, for example – it is made banal and
ineffectual; sought for itself, it imbues the seeker with force of character
and nobility of spirit – two qualities which Nigeria lacks, two virtues upon
which everything else is built.
No doubt a nation is the sum total of the number and quality of its
aggregate citizens. Therefore, a nation without integrity translates into
people and leaders without integrity. Applied internally, integrity is the
glue that turns a crowd into a well-ordered society. It enables trust to be
shared among citizens, and trust is the basis of all human relationship.
Where trust is scarce, suspicion thrives. Where trust is scarce, the bond of
unity, amity and mutual respect is stretched so thin it eventually breaks.
Where trust is scarce, life is wild.
More importantly, a leader with integrity is a man of honour, a
psychologically well-adjusted individual who is inner-directed, self-driven
and altruistic. Only such a person can instil those same qualities into the
citizenry and, by extension, into the psyche of the nation, ensuring her
growth in all spheres of life. A leadership with an acute lack of integrity
such as Nigeria has been experiencing in years cannot steer her people away
from corruption, tribalism, political violence and thuggery, and the other
vices that characterize the nation. Such is the primacy of integrity in
nation-building that it must be sought with urgency.
At 50 the dream Nigeria should be able to provide for her citizens the basic
necessities for a fulfilled life. That Nigeria cannot now do so is obvious
enough. Most of the ills present in our society are predicated on this. In
Lagos, for instance, the annual rent for a 3-bedroom flat on the average is
an upwardly mobile sum of N100,000. The landlord asks for three years
advance; the estate agent asks for 10 per cent of the three years advance;
the lawyer asks for a further 10 per cent as agreement fee. That gives a
total sum of N360, 000.00 just so one can have a roof over one’s head. How
many primary and secondary school teachers can afford that? How many
assistant lecturers or even senior lecturers can afford that? Without
stealing from some other source?
As with housing, so with health. The greed, corruption and
mal-administration that ravaged the nation did not spare the health sector.
Hospitals are empty of drugs and doctors. Doctors and nurses have deserted
their duty posts in the country for Dubai and America. The few still in the
country are available at their private clinics where they charge outrageous
fees. Drugs meant for hospitals are found in private pharmaceutical stores
across the streets. It is sad that in 21st century Nigeria, people still die
from diseases like malaria and tuberculosis long since eradicated in other
countries.
As with housing and health, so with food. Take a family of seven – a father,
a mother and five children. This family will need at least 45.00 loaf of
bread, a N45.00 tin of milk and N10.00 for Lipton and sugar. That means
N100.00 for breakfast. If everybody in this family eats a cup of garri each,
the family will need N70.00 for 7 cups of garri. Assuming the family eats
their garri with N30.00 soup (what joke!) that means a total of N100.00 for
lunch. This same family will need N60.00 for 4 cups of rice and N40.00 for
Maggi or Knorr cubes, onions, tomatoes, and pepper. Sorry – no fish, no
meat! That means yet another N100.00 for dinner. In all, such a family will
need N300.00 for each day’s meal and N9000.00 (300x30 days) to be able to
feed itself in a month. The question then is – how can a Federal Civil
servant conveniently feed his family on a minimum wage of N8000.00 a month?
And the poor fellow has neither paid house rent and NEPA bill, nor made
other sundry but necessary expenditures for the month. How can he ever do
all these without stealing from some other source?
As with housing, health, and food, so with education. Grossly unaffordable
and unqualitative. Nigeria is gradually making education the prerogative of
the rich – an unfortunate development in a country where the poor constitute
about 90 per cent of the population, the middle class having been wiped out
of existence. Take Enugu State University of Science and Technology, ESUT,
for instance, a law student pays N21, 000.00 as tuition and sundry fees for
one session. Minimum wage in Enugu State is about N5000.00 a month. Which
Enugu State civil servant can afford to train one child at the state
university? Without stealing money from some other source? The exorbitant
fees for education is inversely proportional to the quality of education
offered. This engrossing phenomenon is not limited to ESUT; like a voguish
dance-style it has caught on in other state and federal universities and
polytechnics. And like frenzied dancers seeking to outdance one another at a
village contest, they are all lost in the euphoric insanity of the dance.
For how long will it continue – this dance of death, this insanity, this
planlessness, this chaos? For how long? The high rate of inflation in the
country must be controlled, and certain structural imbalances that entrench
corruption and make imperative that a working citizen should spend all of
his salary on inadequate housing, feeding, education and medical services
must be corrected. The correction of these imbalances will make possible the
emergence of a productive middle class – a middle class made up of small and
medium-scale industrialists and entrepreneurs, on whose stability that of
the economy will be based. At 50 Nigeria should be able to provide such
necessities as affordable shelter, food, and quality, affordable – if not
free – education. There should be security of life and property. Amenities
like electricity, telephone and hospitals should not only be functional but
also efficient and affordable. Nigeria should be able to give her citizens a
life worth living and opportunities for self-actualisation. The fulfilment
of the citizens means national growth and development.
At 50 the dream Nigeria should be on the cutting edge of technological
development, at the fore of the computer age. 41 years after independence,
Peugeot Assembly of Nigeria, PAN, and Anambra Motor Manufacturing Company
(ANAMMCO) still remain assembly plants. The idea behind their establishment
was transference of technology and its gradual assimilation by Nigerians.
Unfortunately, there has been neither a real transfer nor a total
assimilation. 41 years after independence, the sad truth is that ‘the
Nigerian car’ remains a dream. With 504 saloon car at well over a million
Naira, despite its being assembled here in Nigeria, most Nigerians have to
content themselves with riding all their life – to the office, market,
school, church or mosque – in second hand ‘tokunbo’ cars and buses. They may
never know the peculiar tang, the clinical cleanliness, and the irresistible
lure of the leather seats of a brand new Nigerian car. The dream Nigeria
should be exporting authentic made-in-Nigeria-cars to neighbouring African
countries, at the very least, and earning foreign exchange from it. The
steel industry should have been in place years before then. Nigerians in
Lagos, Kaduna, Zaria, Enugu, and Aba – to mention only 5 places – should be
going to work in the new industrial cities on the fast tracks of an
efficient rail system.
As for being at the fore of the computer age, at 50 Nigeria should be ranked
as one of the world’s emerging information technology superpowers. She
should have a major cyber city, Africa’s Silicon Valley that will be the
main hub of a massive, Multimedia Super corridor linked to the global
information highway. The city should be home to about 2,500 companies with
200 or 300 high-tech firms at its core. Though the city may not as yet
produce half the world’s hard disks like Singapore, or, like Taiwan,
laptops, monitors, main boards, scanners, keyboards, mice and CD-ROM drives
that take a top share of the global market, it should be racing to overtake
India and Ireland in the export of talents to the world’s high-tech areas
and as the world’s largest exporter of software respectively.
The city should be a major centre for new media, Web content,
internet-advertising, Business-to-Business (B2B) commerce, and other kinds
of high-tech services. It should generate enormous revenue even as it
employs 50 – 100, 000 workers. The revenue and workforce should be capable
of doubling in the next few years. The high-tech city should serve as an
important complement to biomedical, electronics, and other related
industries in the country. It should, in turn, be complemented by top-flight
universities with an annual Research and Development Fund running into
hundreds of millions, which should supply highly educated, skilled and
entrepreneurial workers The city should form the backbone of the new
Nigerian economy, attracting venture capital from the international
community and earning foreign exchange that runs into the billions.
October 2010. Nigeria is 50. Will she have become a nation on the cutting
edge of technological development, an emerging information technology
superpower, a nation responsibly providing for her citizens the basic
necessities for a fulfilled life, and a nation with integrity, where trust
is abundant – in just 9 years from now? Or rather, can she? Of course she
can. She has the brawn. She has the brain. She has the human resource. She
has the natural resource. Therefore, the possibilities for the future are
endless. With determination, selflessness, zeal, and vision, with a long
foresight and a deep insight steered with the hindsight of past errors and
triumphs, this gazelle can yet emerge onto the sunlit meadows, graceful and
resplendent.
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