,
16 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
Dr. Victor Olaiya, in his popular song, released in 1983, titled "ilu le" literarily translated as "the nation is hard" perfectly painted a picture of a country experiencing economic hardship of some sort. A country experiencing prosperity, would not have been said to be hard.
Later in that Era, there was a popular song "Andrew no check out o, Nigeria go survive" a song admonishing a particular citizen named Andrew, not to check out of the country in frustration. The singer further states the very opportunities of wealth in terms of natural resources
available in the country and all of that. Andrew would not have contemplated checking out of a "working Nigeria". I also want to state categorically that at those periods of our lives, infrastructures were being planted all over the country, while our population was growing //
exponentially. Festac was built in the late 70s, many federal estates were built in that Era, Jakande Estates spung up at those periods of our lives.
IN the late 90s and early 2000s, some other artists like African China and Idris Abdulkarim also lent their voice to the same
IN the late 90s and early 2000s, some other artists like African China and Idris Abdulkarim also lent their voice to the same
economic woes a supposed giant of Africa was going through. I remember in the mid 90s under the military dictator, Sanni Abacha, the poverty was so much that the middle class finally waned away. At a point in this country, people used saw dustfoe domestic cooking, others used
adulterated fuels made from diesel to cook when the price of kerosene became unbearable. Going back to the 2000s, popular songs of the millennium, "Nigeria jaga jaga" and "lead us well" by Idris and African China respectively, clearly described the going ons in the entity
called Nigeria. It was at this particular period, that many of us became more aware of our environment. I can not point out to any serious infrastructure, at least personally in my immediate environment, apart from the sango bridge built by the then Speaker of the HOR.
as far as I can rememeber, we have never had good roads, adequate power supply, adequate housing, good medical care, in fact, it was in the 2000s that our schools broke down finally, when strike actions became so normal that we couldn't complete a session before our lecturers
would down their tools. In the same period, private school started springing up to the detriment of the public ones. This further depend the gap between the rich and the poor, while the population kept increasing in exponential rate. Around this period was when the
biggest government corporations like NITEL, Nigeria airways were either sold off or liquidated. I doubt if a working economy would liquidate its institutions that were the highest employers of labor, I very much doubt it. Retrospectively, I wonder, when any Nigerian has
experienced prosperity and wealth in the last 3 to 4 decades. The only prosperity experienced so far, is the one that came to Nigeria as a result of soaring price of crude oil, which was shared by the ruling class ND their cronies, while leaving the crumbs for us to fight on.
the wealth that came about by corruption, which tried to replace the government corporations that were sold, trying to fill the void created unsuccessfully though, that was the wealth we experienced. Finally, Nigeria to work at all, the infrastructural gap needs to be reduced,
Our population needs to be controlled, however difficult it may seem, we need to grow what we eat, taking example from China, we need to be patient as the reason why we thought we were better off previously was partly because of the high price of crude oil and nothing else.
if indeed Nigeria ever worked before, we would not be building roads, power plants and rails at this period, despite our huge incomes from oil, we would by now talk about human capacity development and all that as a working country would have created an enabling environment
for such. We would have been exporting food crops creating genuine wealth, growing what we use and eat. That is what we call real wealth, and it can only happen in a working Nigeria. God bless 🇳🇬.
