Eddie Iroh's Intervention

Those of us who remember it will never forget it. It was perhaps the most iconic signpost on our country’s downward journey in the eighties. A seemingly simple two-frame cartoon in the Sunday Times by Owolabi (Owo Blow!) captured the tragedy of a nation in decline more than a trilogy of books could.

A man had just left a bank carrying a sack of money. Just as he came on to the street, a masked man put a gun to the head of the moneyman and growled: “Give me all your money or I will blow your brains out!” The moneyman looked at his sack of money, then looked at the gunman, and calmly replied: “My friend, in this Nigeria you can live without brains but not without money. So go ahead and shoot!” I don’t know what has happened to the highly gifted Owolabi or where he is now. But whatever the case, he left an indelible footprint with that single piece of art.

Like all great works of art, it was both timely and timeless, for it is as true and relevant today as it was then. The Nigeria Owolabi portrayed in the Second Republic has remained the same and in many ways worse, two Republics, four military regimes and 30 years later. Only the beneficiaries from our decline and decadence will disagree. We still live in a world that believes in money over intellect.

Owolabi’s Second Republic captured the era of the petro-dollar, when economic power came out of the barrel of crude oil. Following on the heels of 15 years of military dictatorships that were characterised by an anti-intellectual culture, the foundation of the supremacy of money over mind was laid. And that has remained at the root of our many maladies and tragedies. We still find that it is easier to make money than make things. Oil enabled us to create a multi-millionaire class whose offices consisted of a briefcase and a pack of business cards, and who never employed a single soul.

In an era of the knowledge economy, we have been repeatedly warned that the world can no longer depend on what comes out of the ground for its development and greatness but on what comes out of the human mind. Klaus Schwab, who founded the World Economic Forum, has told us that talent, rather than capital, is today’s greatest resource. But undeterred, we still look at our massive oil and gas reserves and hail ourselves as a great nation. And we forget that we burn away more gas than we have managed to harness.

Of course even Stevie Wonder can see that Nigeria is greatly blessed by God. Indeed experts testify that at least 19 of the 22 most strategic minerals in the world can be found in Nigeria. But if you may pardon my language, so bloody what?  How has that changed the price of a cup of garri? Perhaps it would be worth our while to ponder the case of Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer. If the Saudis were to shut their oil wells for just one day, its impact on the world economy would be instant and catastrophic.

But quite strangely, so would it be on the Saudi economy itself because it is dependent almost entirely on oil; on what comes out of the ground.  Here is a more poignant question. Why is Saudi Arabia not among the G-8 most developed economies in the world, an exclusive club of which Japan, with virtually no natural resources except perhaps tuna fish, is a leading member as the world’s third largest economy?

The question this raises for Nigeria is, why has she not exploited her enormous natural wealth and put it to productive, rather than merely extractive use? Why do we still produce little or nothing that derive from our mineral wealth?  Our natural gas reserve, on which our future prosperity rests, is far greater than our oil reserve. Yet neither oil nor gas fully serves our domestic needs. The small number of urban homes that use cooking gas still have to lug around cumbersome cylinders in a world where gas is piped into homes in the same manner water is supplied.

We are the world’s sixth largest oil producer, but we queue for hours at fuel stations to buy common kerosene which, in any case, is hardly used by anybody as cooking fuel in today’s world.  We do not even refine enough of our oil to meet our domestic needs. And in what has to be the ultimate tragic irony, we import fuel, the very commodity we have aplenty, while we export electricity (which we do not have enough of) to neighbouring African countries. The several dozen by-products from refined petroleum are not fully exploited because our refineries are not sophisticated enough to achieve that. More sadly, we appear to lack the skill to keep our refineries fully serviced and maintained, in spite of our Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) rituals.

The reason for these contradictions is quite evident when we reflect on Owolabi’s satire. We have “prospered” without fully applying our brains to the challenges of our times.  We have made money by digging into the ground for solid and liquid minerals but not into our minds for the next level of prosperity. We do not even have an education system that develops the mind for the new challenges.

There is, in the affairs of a nation, a critical confluence where mind takes over and turns materials into money. That is when change happens. Call it the tipping point. I find that it is at that point that we have failed, flat on our face because it will not make us instant millionaires. In other words, our parlous situation persists because we have found an easier way to make money without making things, even if those things will make money in the end.  We live for now because the advantage of extractive wealth is that it is instant, cash and carry. Making things take too much time and mental effort. We would rather import.

The state of the nation captured in Owolabi’s succinct satire, in its full and proper examination, explains why nearly all our strategic public corporations collapsed soon after independence and later the civil war. These include the Nigerian National Shipping Lines, Nigerian Railways, Nigerian Coal Corporation, and more recently Nigerian Airways and Nigerian Telecommunications (NITEL). We had the same calamities in the private sector with the collapse of Volkswagen and Steyr Tractors. Similarly, stagnation has characterised Peugeot Automobiles in Kaduna and Mercedes Trucks in Enugu. These assembly plants were to form the nucleus of vehicle manufacturing in Nigeria but have remained the stunted dwarfs of Nigerian industrialisation. Our Ajaokuta Steel complex has produced complex challenges which we have not been able to overcome in 30 years. And dare I mention NEPA/PHCN? But I cannot help sharing the tale of a young Nigerian who spent two “magnificent weeks” in South Africa. She continued her vacation with a week in Ghana where, according to her, “there was not even a flicker” in power supply. She then returned to Nigeria and spent Christmas day without power supply from 6am. I told her that she was not old enough to know that 30 years ago, we drove all Ghanaian citizens out of Nigeria as “illegal aliens”. In the process, we invented Ghana Must Go.

Now it is more like Nigeria Must Go (to Ghana, for vacation, education and investment!); a good case of reversal of fortunes.

Let me end this by sharing with you one of my greatest worries. I harbour the very mortal fear that the vast majority of Nigerians under the age of 50 have not known any other Nigeria than the present state of incompetence and dilapidation. Without a point of reference to the days when we had an efficient rail system that could transport one from Port Harcourt to Kaura Namodi, a national air carrier that competed on international routes with the old British Caledonia and Pan American airlines, the Electric Corporation of Nigeria (ECN) that delivered regular power, etc, they will be permitted to think that our parlous situation today has always been the accepted norm. In such a complacent mindset, change will be extremely difficult. Indeed how do you explain to such a person that in 1960 Nigeria produced more than 60 per cent of world palm oil?

Or that Malaysia, an oil-producer like Nigeria, took the palm seed from us to develop what is today one of her most lucrative industries, with over 96 by-products?  And don’t be surprised if some of the brains behind the Malaysia venture are Nigerians. For as Larry said in the South African film that caricatured our country, “Nigeria is a country so talented that she does not know how to put her talents to use...that is why Nigerians can be found in every facet of human endeavour - mostly outside their own country.”

Meanwhile we are still queuing for common kerosene!