The Export Brief The Export Brief 2 | Page 59

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