It’s been long this page started a discourse with a quote. We return to it today with a beautiful one by Dr. Mensa Otabil, a Ghanaian scholar and pastor. We are taking it because it is very relevant to the subject matter for today.
“The future of Africa will be determined by our foresight, wisdom and planning. We need to think clearly, plan thoroughly and execute our plans with precision. The key to Africa’s development is not in our natural resources; the key to our development is our grey mater. Our wealth resides in our heads. Our greatness lies in the wisdom we can harness as a people, to turn our resources into huge industrial boom for the continent. The value and beauty of a house is determined by the ideas of the architect and the accuracy of the builder. Your wisdom will determine whether you put up a cheap building that falls apart (later) or a solid but elegant building that stands the taste of time. Wisdom is the builder. Building materials bend to the wisdom of the builder. Similarly, natural resources cannot build Africa. It is wisdom that will build Africa.”
What Otabil said is not just a fact, it is the truth. The richest nations in the world are not the most endowed in terms of natural resources, rather those blessed with abundant natural resources are mostly the ones suffering the pains of under-development. Unfortunately, our country, the so-called giant of Africa ranks very high on the list of such nations. The lesson in what Otabil said is that until the brain goes before, in vain shall such nations continue to struggle
The position is unassailable. A critical review of our development chart would show that that has been our fate. We jump from one political system to another; we cheer ourselves that we have got it, yet years come and go but the situation remains either the same or in some instances becomes worse. We started from parliamentary system of government and suddenly ran to embrace presidential system. After 20 years, not a few are romancing with the idea of a return to parliamentary system, which we said did not serve us right the first time. This trend is a product of confusion and lack of clarity of thought. It is also a confirmation of our inability to be authentic. Last week we seized the occasion of the Children’s Day (May 27) to take another critical look at our children and the kind of future we will leave behind for them. The consensus was that we as a collective have abandoned our core responsibilities to the successor generation. The parents no longer think they owe the obligation of training them; social units teach them entertainment and the government compounds it through poor governance. There is no national ideology and so the young ones cannot be indoctrinated into anything. The vacuum in their minds is filled by funny aspects of Western influences.
Education should be free for a country like ours and the issue of needed manpower given the necessary emphasis, but that is not what the government is doing. One result of this is that 59 years after independence, Lebanese and Egyptians construct our roads while every other thing we require for basic living must be imported. Today, it is said that about 90 million Nigerians are unemployed and many are wondering how this came about. The answer can be found in the quote Otabil gave to us. We have not allowed knowledge, reason and wisdom or the process of Discover-Develop-Deploy to apply in the way we have managed our affairs. “Adhocism” has been both the philosophy and the pattern. In this atmosphere successive administrators come to power and make their private ideals the policy of state. So every time something new is going on and it would not matter whether it has relevance to classical development or not, yet before you could say “Jack Robinson”, trillions in funding have gone into the project.
At the level of development of this country, there is no need for elaborate inauguration ceremonies, developed nations can do with the fanfare associated with this; they would have created enough wealth to underwrite such expenditure and more importantly, they have something qualitative to showcase. A man that does not have a house in the village should not invite friends to an elaborate occasion, because that would amount to irrational display of the highest form of folly. This is where we are: insecurity, poor infrastructure, fallen standard of education, primitive or rudimentary economic base, slums called urban centres, and a very hungry and dislocated population. This is what we have, and this is not the kind of things you show to visitors; so if we were sensible we should do what the Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians and a few others did, shut the door to ourselves and think out our salvation, but that is not what we are doing, rather we like undue exhibitionism.
Some of us critically followed the political campaigns that cumulated in the 2019 general elections. We undertook in-depth review of 20 years of democratic practice, and our finding is that this country is not developing. If anything we are moving into the inner recesses of under development at an alarming speed. The semblance of sound democratic culture we had has been eroded; the electoral process has little credibility. The civil service has been destroyed by the political class, which has replaced merit with nepotism and favouritism. We have destroyed the police. The army that was once our pride is on the verge of total destruction. Increasingly, we are militarizing the society, we opt for force even for issues that dialogue and negotiation can solve. The state of our social infrastructure is terrible and the worst is that we are linking development of social infrastructure to classical development, downplaying the place of relevant human capital development.
Ask our leaders to point to what they are doing, almost all of them would point to massive buildings, a few poorly done roads, peripheral activities in agriculture and that is all. The situation is made worse by lack of synergy between the federal, state and local governments; each is on its own doing what they like. What they do cannot give us development; it can only leave us with what we have already: contraptions and chaos. We need to run on vision (national development plan), reason (sorting out and sequencing) and right wisdom application (intelligent deployment of resources). Subsequently, we would make an in-depth review of how we have missed it and what can be done to remedy it. Cheers!