largest in Africa, is constantly at risk of
falling into recession, unable to create
enough competitive jobs to absorb the
ever-increasing population of young
people entering the labor market each
year, unable to guarantee a modest
standard of living for its citizens.
Today, we have a country which despite
being the largest economy in Africa, and
having one of the highest proportion of
educated people in Africa, cannot
compete with the likes of Rwanda (35
times smaller than Nigeria), Mauritius (a
small Island country off the African coast)
or even Kenya.
We have a nation that continues to lose
some of its best brains to other countries
which are able to offer better
opportunities for growth and personal
survival, countries in many cases with less
than a quarter of what makes Nigeria a
potential economic giant.
We are now left with a country that is
afraid of signing trade agreements for fear
of becoming a dumping ground for inferior
products or for fear of not being able to
compete with trading partners.
While our ‗leaders‘ continue to gripe
about ‗sustaining our democracy‘ and who
is best qualified to ‗deliver the dividends of
democracy‘, the Calabar port continues to
recess into irrelevance and Calabar once a
town bubbling with economic activities
struggles to find a place in the nation‘s
economic narrative; other port cities
outside Lagos continue to languish under
the weight of poor infrastructure and lack
of patronage, our educational institutions
continue to run programs that bear little
relevance to the needs of today or the
demands of tomorrow.
We have no real excuses
As a nation, Nigeria cannot continue for
long to delude itself that the solutions to
our problems lie outside our control, or
that our problems are caused by ‗lopsided‘
trading agreements, designed to screw our
nation over.
We wouldn‘t be talking about Nigeria
being a ‗dumping ground‘ if we had
focused on developing our non-oil sectors
with the windfall profits from the oil
sector through the decades; focused on
building industries, roads, rails and ports
with linkages to inner cities to create
economic centers of activity spread across
the country; if we had ploughed a
significant portion of our oil revenues into
developing a vibrant educational sector.
So should Nigeria sign
the AfCFTA or not?
This question is as irrelevant as asking
―should I sleep in the day or in the night?‖
It really doesn‘t matter. Successive
generations of Nigerian ‗leaders‘ have
contrived by their actions and inactions to
disappoint the current generation who
now seem intent on carrying on the