Africa must learn from the Curse of Oil Foreign Income brought upon Nigeria. The country went from a land that flowed with milk and honey where Africans at home and in Diaspora took relief and refuge at that time, to the present one that cannot save itself, not to talk of saving other Africans. If behavior is covered or intoxicated by a flush of money (miss road), it attracts some followers. Stomach infrastructure reduces some hustlers to tolerating unbecoming characters.
Nigeria survived and strived despite the yoke of colonialism to a Potential Regional Power with meager Cocoa, groundnuts, and Palm Oil incomes. The country even survived a terrible Civil War without borrowing a kobo from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, defying all odds until Structural Adjustment finally brought Nigeria down to its knees. Reduced purchasing power created the rush to loot mercilessly to buy all that glitters in Western countries.
How? African Values, patriotic activists, and the culture of It Takes A Village to Raise A Child kept Nigeria going. We lost all to greed, longing for foreign goods and services we could have gradually mastered at home, through trial and error like the Asians: call it Ijebu-made or Okrika-made. Asians used to come to Nigeria to earn money to feed their starving families at home during their famine.
The flush of money does intoxicate a man like a drunken sailor. It is like many drugs that take the worst control of your senses, becoming imprudent by lavish and conspicuous waste of otherwise resourceful income for the masses’ comfort. Usually, values are the superego that override our egotistical characters and greed. We call some of these values: home training. The lack of which turns a loose boy into a street urchin, hooligan or motor park thug.
The difference between OMOBORIOWO and OWOBORIOMO, simply put, is the loss of our values to greed. Credit must be given to Tai Solari, who made the distinction during the political power play between the then Governor of Ondo State, Chief Michael Ajasin and his Deputy Governor, Chief Akin Omoboriowo. The competition between the governor and the deputy has not changed till now, especially in these days of grabbing any allocation and who snatches it first.
All the money, gold or oil income cannot restore the dignity Africans or Nigerians once enjoyed outside their borders. The effect of money wears off unless you keep on injecting it like a drug until temporary relief or a cure is found. The more money you embezzle and outrageously display, the more that is expected until you run dry and out. Ask some Nigerian millionaires and billionaires in any country other than their own. Most have overstayed their welcome.
Nigerians look for schools, hospitals, and jobs they could have built in their own country. They
even go outside the country, donating endowments to foreign universities where their children graduate while local schools lack basic needs. Local talents and those who were trained earn meagre income, as investments are the ones that are sold (family) properties, borrowed, or looted to find a better country after destroying theirs.
When you neglect what you are good at and pursue what others are better at, Africa loses. We import what we have and produce: like textiles, oil, and food. We export what we do not have, like printing foreign currencies. We went from exporting Peace Keeping Forces all over Africa and the world to the point where Nigerians cannot help ourselves against insecurity at home. Terrorists were warned in other African countries: there is no place for them except in Nigeria!
Indeed, Nigeria imported terrorists from Libya and Fulani from anywhere, guaranteeing them citizenship on entry to perpetrate mayhem for political reasons disguised as religious zealots. As if we do not have enough criminals at home to deal with. Either way, local people are killed, displaced, and their land mined for minerals for export with the cooperation of local chiefs, retired military leaders, and international corporations. What a country!
More Nigerian parents, especially the exporters of foreign currencies, celebrate the graduation of their children in foreign universities than in local universities out of an inferiority complex. We blame our political leaders for laundering our earned income abroad but do not blame ourselves for laundering our training and talents abroad in the name of a better future and education for the children that will be lost as second-class citizens abroad.
We all blame the bad leadership we elected and deserve. Instead of fighting back, we melt into the wall. Nigerians talk about the lack of an enabling environment but they go to other countries without the same infrastructure only to build a new plant for powering their industries, roads to transport their products out for sale. In some cases, they import materials produced in other countries back into Nigeria in order to earn foreign currencies.
What we don’t have enough of, like skilled tradesmen and technical professionals in sciences, save, garner money and relocate to so-called greener pastures where they become second-class citizens and lose their children to miseducation. When you convert their apparent foreign salaries to African local currencies, it looks large. What most Africans do not realize is that their salary after expenses is not enough to live large abroad as they would with it in Africa.
Is it not unfortunate when Nigerians brag about a lucky or token few or a desperado that crosses the desert and makes it “big” in a foreign land? We forget about many that perish on the journey for “all that glitter is not gold”. What this does is to encourage more Africans to keep on trying to be filthy rich or die trying like a gambler waiting for the next number. Meanwhile, they could spend saved money like a steady horse that wins the race to open a business employing others.
Those Africans living a so-called comfortable life abroad work twice as hard on two or three jobs as their colleagues working on one job. Families hardly have time to spend with one another, especially with the children. They call them “latchkey children” because they return to empty houses. Money, no matter how much, can only be productive if spent prudently, not foolishly like a drunken sailor in a family, country, or continent.
If we only return to our African Values that It Takes A Village To Raise A Child, we would be better off than we are today.
