NIGERIA: Averting a Ship Wreck

Nigeria has, evidently, fallen on bad times.
If anyone had predicted that our country would dwarf Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan concerning daily occurrence of sordid events, he or she would have been dismissed as an amateur shaman. The pro-democracy struggles of the 90s, for which many of us suffered privation of varying degrees, with some paying the ultimate price, could not have contemplated the disastrous consequences of our passivity and, sometimes, active connivance. Nigerians watched with trepidation as Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo imposed a sick man and a mediocre personality on us as the President and the Vice President respectively. The man is, currently, pontificating on the best way possible to rule the country. He expresses regret, in a characteristic display of hypocrisy and mischief on the state of things in the country today.
The impostors at the seat of power shocked the knowledgeable around the globe with a ludicrous claim that the country is the largest economy. They ignore the simple economic logic which places production at the base of any realistic economic development. A country that can hardly boast of 4,000 megawatts of electricity, which prides itself on being about the only place in the world where importation is based mainly on what is produced locally, where life is the cheapest commodity and security seems an utopian possibility, that no news is considered tragic and shocking any longer, celebrates her status as the importer of anything.

*This was published in the Daily Times dated Tuesday, December 30, 2014