Current Affairs Window: Alternative and Appropriate Context of Real Issues in the Nation’s Dialogue Space
- “The crisis (in Nigeria today), writes Antonio Gransci, consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. The good news however is that the big head of the New Nigeria has crossed the pelvic joint: the issue is no longer whether the delivery will be normal or not, it is the momentum to go for the final push and that is precisely what SANNEM is out to facilitate. Do please stand up to be counted.
- In 2003, the Nigeria Economy Summit Group (NESG) invited a member of the global knowledge community called Paul Collier to come and share his experience with the Nigerian Economic Elite at that year’s Nigeria Economic Summit. Paul Collier, by the way, was a Professor of African Studies at the Oxford University London at the time. When he was invited to make his presentation, he drew the attention of the elite community to the most serious, but silent, impediment on the path of Nigerian economic development. He told the audience how he tried a comparative study of Nigeria and Malaysia with a view to finding out at what point Malaysia overtook Nigeria in development stride and how it happened. He said that midway in Nigerian side of the study, he ran into a huge mountain that truncated his effort. He described the mountain as “preponderance of perverse discourse in Nigeria’s dialogue space”. He told the audience that this is peculiar to Nigeria.
Now what was Paul Collier telling the Summit with this diplomatic observation? He was simply telling them that Nigeria’s dialogue space is saturated with falsehood, misinformation and distortion. There was no reaction to this strategic observation either with him or outside the summit hall, because Nigerians do not realize the implication of exposing a nation’s experience to distortion and the trend has gotten progressively worse.
Here is the implication of exposing a nation’s experience to distortions: Economic Development is a design of God to sustain human beings on earth when the local population grows beyond the size that can be sustained by primary resources alone. It is guided by natural laws, the one we call science. The first of that law is the law of experience: this first law demands that every country must build on the strength of its experience and a country can grow economically only as it is able to predicate its future on the lessons of its experience. The experience of a nation consists of the good, the bad and the ugly side of its past and present and information from the external environment about which its economy must compete to get its fair share of the global resources. It is the combined capacity of these four elements that define the ideal direction of an economy and how it can get there. Once these critical elements of a nation’s economic growth capacities are exposed to distortions, the country will be caught in the web of regression that no UN resolution can reverse. Thus, the massive exposure of our nation’s experience to distortions is the single most serious reason why our nation’s economic development has remained stunted and not the failure of leadership as the common sense suggests. Incidentally, greater part of these distortions are built into the nation’s rich experience by the ignorant effort of those who actually meant well including many who have been disoriented to believe that freedom of expression is the license to spread falsehood. What this page seeks to do therefore, is to protect the experience of our nation and economy against these distortions so that they do not further delay the delivery of the new Nigeria that Nigerians desire this season. So watch out on a daily basis.