Reviving Our Economy: From Dependency to Self-Sufficiency

Friends, our country is experiencing harsh economic times, and so are families. To overcome this, we have tough choices to make to survive beyond the now.

First, we need to take responsibility for the current situation, symbolized here as a ‘bus stop, ‘by tracing our past to the wrong choices our leaders and ourselves made.

Before you took me to the cleaners, let us explore how we aligned with visionless leaders to ground our country. Didn’t we all prefer foreign rice to our locally grown rice? How much value have we added to our cassava to export them to earn dollars?

Have we asked ourselves why we dropped from one of the top producers of cotton, groundnut, and cocoa to the level of importing beans and wheat into a country blessed with all-round-year favorable weather for agriculture? What value did we add to our adire and aso oke fabrics to attract dollars that would have helped in part to stabilize our currencies?

China in faraway Beijing is adding value to the value chain of our local garri, and I am sure that we will be importing garri from China very soon. Before you throw me under the bus for this suggestion, didn’t Malaysia take palm seeds from Nigeria to become the world’s top palm oil producer? What has happened to all our palm and rubber plantations around the country?

In all these failings, we can see that the interplay of leadership, characterized by a lack of long-term vision and strategic planning and the citizens’ inability to envision the future and act, are responsible for our failings and economic woes.

The beauty of our situation is that the turnaround can be swift once we shift our focus to consuming what we produce. Now is the time to embrace a new approach, to use our resources, especially crude oil, to invest in research and development to enhance the value of our local products and make them competitive for export. Nigeria can lead in agriculture, innovation, and technology. Let us be intentional in our investments, prioritizing those that will bring foreign currency back into our economy.

As leaders and citizens, we must reject procrastination and indecisiveness. We cannot allow our country to be littered with abandoned projects. This is different from the legacy we want to leave. We must stand against the unnecessary importation of goods we can produce in Nigeria. We all have a part to play. Let’s start by planting our gardens and growing our vegetables, peppers, and tomatoes. States should encourage landowners to utilize their empty agricultural plots until they are ready to build houses.

Our government, at all levels, has a crucial role to play. We should actively invite interested investors to establish their industries here but on our terms. We should demand that they use our raw materials in-country, not export them.

Most importantly, we must provide reliable electricity to attract manufacturers, as demonstrated by Abia’s success. Anything less than this is a charade we can no longer afford. Let us move forward with hope and determination. Grace and peace!!!