One of the reasons why the white man look down on us is because we fritter away the opportunities we have to be a processing nation and the ability to be self sufficient.
If I may ask, is chocolate processing rocket science? We still export cocoa raw and earn peanuts. We are where we are because we have dunces in charge of governance. Yet, they’ve been talking about economic diversification to the point of bursting our ear drums!
In 2019, China earned $31.4 billion from export of toys! Are toys rocket science?
In 2019, Bangladesh earnings from textiles equalled our revenues from our accursed oil: $34.13 billion! Is textile rocket science? Our textile mills in Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, Aba are comatose, stifled by cheap imports and the goddamned okrika!
The palm oil seeds and expertise Malaysia acquired from our NIFOR (Benin City) in the 60s, now yield an average of $16 billion in export revenues from palm oil and allied products. We even import palm oil from them now! Is palm oil business as complex as commercial plane manufacture and space exploration?
Germany, without a single cocoa tree, among other Western nations, alone, rakes in roughly $6 billion from chocolate exports annually.
The cocoa producers of Ivory Coast, Ghana Nigeria…earn peanuts combined.
O bo lowo omo to nje eeru!
Common public water distribution is nil in most of our state capitals! Whereas, in the early 1900s, an Ijesha man, Candido Da Rocha, the Lodifi of Ilesha, started the public water works at Iju, which serves parts of Lagos till this day, as a private venture. Remove Iju Waterworks today and tell me what remains of public water in Nigeria’s commercial capital.
Yet, we praise some of our governors: XYZ is trying sha!
And the so-called leaders are not helped to see they’re dancing naked because of pathological sycophants and numskulls posturing as intellectuals, always coming to their defence and blaming everyone looking up to them for leadership as part of the problem, as if we could have made a headway as a country without government!
How?! Yet we travel around the world and see what’s happening. The whole world, including our erstwhile Third World peers, have left us behind!
My Ijebu kinsmen would say, Awon alaraka! Alaraka ni wa! Alainitiju!
Let’s think.
