In issues management, a resolution is best accomplished when the root cause analysis is adequately interrogated, and then confronted. No challenge or issue can ever be resolved or conquered when you fail to interrogate or confront it, based on ignorance, timidity, docility, cowardice or compromise. This is the situation we have dug ourselves into in Nigeria, when we review some glaring issues that have kept us where we are today. It is therefore futile for us to live in perpetual denial or delusion.
Economic woes in Nigeria have been attributed to NON-DIVERSIFICATION, MASSIVE IMPORTATION, LOW PRODUCTIVITY and the humongous payments on PETROLEUM PRODUCTS SUBSIDY, over the years. But in keeping with his electioneering promises, President Bola Tinubu on assumption of office in May 2023, courageously abolished that subsidy scourge. Did Nigerians interrogate what efforts were on ground to eliminate, completely, the importation of petroleum products, by a country endowed with petroleum resources and owns four refineries of 445,000bpd capacity? Why was it difficult to resuscitate the moribund refineries with the huge funds available and devoted to subsidy payments? We all looked the other way as the refineries lay comatose and massive products importation continued, under dwindling foreign reserves. But is it not a shame that in Biafra that was completely blockaded, while at war, over 50 years ago, the enclave was able to build and run two refineries at Uzuakoli and Amandugba, using locally fabricated equipment and personnel?
Our bleeding economy has degenerated to food insecurity and general inflation, manifested in public outcry for improved living conditions. Little wonder that the Labour Unions are asking for massive review of the minimum wage to allow workers survive these harsh conditions. But the governors, under the aegis of the Nigerian Governors Forum [NGF], have declared their unwillingness and inability to pay the federal government recommended N60,000. But are Nigerians asking why they have collectively taken such a stand? Are Nigerians not aware of their profligate tendencies, of their daily Government House banqueting on tax payers sweat, their convoys of exotic vehicles, their appropriation of Local Government funds, and more repulsive, their secretive capture of huge unaudited security votes. If all these could be curbed for more frugal governance, why should they not care for the masses they vowed to add value to their lives? But we have refused to interrogate them.
Mother nature has endowed Nigeria with massive arable land and we tend to forget that agriculture was once our major foreign exchange earner. Have we bothered to fully interrogate the decline in farming and agricultural produce? Why have farmlands been abandoned and food insecurity adding to the prevailing multi-dimensional poverty? Are Nigerians not aware that OPEN GRAZING in Nigeria in the 21st century has encouraged the incursion and invasion by herdsmen and their livestock from neighbouring countries to join to wreak havoc on our farms and inflict death and insecurity on our land? Yet, to challenge a motion on the Senate floor to ban open grazing and promote ranching, a Nigerian senator equated such a ban to restriction of freedom of movement. This is the mindset and quality of leadership we have in Nigeria in the 21st century.
Ignorance, docility, timidity, cowardice, and the patience to wait for your turn to grab, will continue to take a God-blessed country like Nigeria backwards. Sad.
