Picture a scenario in which Nigeria succeeds. Where will you be standing?
Before we explore such a possibility, picture another playscript: where the Nigerian sits at a table to ‘brainstorm’ or ‘jawjaw’ with foreign diplomats of the British, French or American consulate.
Some wonderful imagery you have there, perhaps. Mine encompasses promising male and female Nigerians speaking from the left side, right side, or both sides of the mouth.
Like the proverbial prodigal who points out his ancestral home with the accursed left finger, these characters forget that no foreign ambassador operating on our native soil, was appointed primarily to advance Nigeria’s prosperity ahead of his homeland’s. No foreign consulate truly empowers Nigerians ahead of its own citizens. Every imperialist state, in the end, is driven by selfish interests.
Why, then, should Nigerians imagine themselves exempt from this universal law of international relations?
This is why we must all unite in uncommon wisdom. The Nigerian conversation must mature beyond endless criticism and caustic riposte: ‘If Nigerian happens to you, eh?’ or a penchant for anti-Nigerian maleficence.
Public discourse must surpass the malignant soapboxes of pessimism. Nigeria won’t prosper by our masterful lamentation and cataloguing of corruption, insecurity, unemployment, inflation, among other national or private disappointments; shall we commit to a more fruitful venture? No society succeeds simply because its citizens perfected despair.
Against this backdrop subsists the imperative for optimism. Consider, for instance, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s projection of a $1 trillion Nigerian economy by 2030. One trillion dollars is, no doubt, a figure so enormous that it immediately divides opinion. To some, it signifies bold leadership. To others, it is another populist gimmick in the tenor of the ill-fated Vision 2010 and Vision 2020, among others.
Yet, the question is no longer whether Tinubu’s government can build a trillion-dollar economy driven by expanded productive capacity in infrastructure, energy, maritime, manufacturing, agriculture, technology, solid minerals, petrochemicals and other non-oil sectors, or whether the projection is too grandiose or insufficiently ambitious.
For the average Nigerian, it has become more urgent to ask: Where do I fit into the economy that is being imagined?
If the Federal Government succeeds, even by a smidgen, in transforming Nigeria into a larger productive economy driven by manufacturing, technology, energy, agriculture, creative industries and private capital, where exactly do I stand? Where do you stand?
Entire generations have been conditioned to think only in terms of government performance, waiting for government to either disappoint or pleasantly surprise us. Yet, as Nigeria undergoes radical economic transformation, fortune won’t visit those who merely malign or applaud policy from atop their soapboxes, online and offline.
When China industrialised and opened its economy, millions smartly repositioned themselves before Europe realised what was happening. When the Gulf States transformed deserts into financial and logistics capitals, prosperity smiled first upon those who anticipated change rather than those who debated its possibility.
Are you merely observing history or set to profit from it? This is a more uncomfortable question because it removes us as citizens from the gallery of chronic lamentation and places us inside a more urgent narrative.
President Tinubu’s projected $1 trillion economy won’t be accomplished via public spending alone but through synergy with private capital; yet, Mr President must understand that beyond grand pronouncements and gestures of implementation, his trillion-dollar economy may be doomed to fail if it simply fetes the political and corporate business class, and locks out, as usual, average Nigerians. His grand and ambitious projections must be facilitated to accommodate every class of citizen. It mustn’t be hijacked by party stalwarts, henchmen and loyalists.
Again, this brings us back to the question: If the project succeeds, where will you and I be standing? I choose to answer this as a journalist.
For the average journalist, to profit from Tinubu’s trillion-dollar economy may forever be a mirage. If the ‘math is simply not mathing’ and the future looks bleak for you even amid such ambitious and monumental projections, it’s about time you looked inwards and took a more progressive, radical turn perhaps.
There is a profound, suffocating sadness in watching an estate that once produced giants get reduced to a gathering of hungry mice. The trillion-dollar economy should never be one in which journalists fight and fall over one another in the digital public square, jostling like market scavengers for crumbs of attention, while it should be the other way round. The jury is out on who is to blame, but I dare say that our fate would improve when we start approaching our duty as a witness and quit trading our skills like mercenaries.
Whether as commissioned apologists for crooked politicians, publicists for superficial entertainment celebrities, praise-singers for predatory banks, or digital mercenaries for murder convicts on trial, the modern Nigerian journalist has become a tragic caricature of the fringe player. Even those who parade themselves on late-night television as courageous truthtellers are often engaged in nothing more than a cynical audition. They do not rail against power structures from a place of deep, decolonial moral vision, but with the desperate hope that their principals in the opposition will, by some radical stroke of political fortune, grab state power and employ them as the new official attack dogs of the state. It’s often subtle and at times, brazenly perpetrated to the applause or attacks of the media audience.
If we must profit from a Greater Nigeria, then we must be liberated from economic distress. The latter has been responsible for the media’s professional and ethical rut.
Several reporters are trapped in a system that treats them with institutional scorn, salaries inadequate to foot basic living expenses, even while being viewed with inexplicable hostility by the very society they claim to serve. Many veterans, unless they secure patronage from the political class, hardly enjoy a storied twilight. Most are caught in a mad scramble for entry-level or mid-cadre public relations gigs and government media assistant roles.
It is a damning cycle. You spend twenty years and above chasing deadlines, breathing the dust of campaign trails, and ruining your eyesight under the flickering neon lights of poorly funded sub-editing pools, only to realise you cannot afford the simple decencies of life, let alone its finer graces. It doesn’t matter if you are excellent or mediocre at this craft; your fate is sealed in a concrete cell of poverty from which escape is a nightmare.
To cope with this terror, many swallow their pride and pretend. They mask their unethical acts as sacrifices made in pursuit of the public good. They tout themselves as patriots while holding the coattails of the shadiest politicians and corporate fraudsters. It gets infinitely scarier when this desperation is exploited by imperialist forces.
Enter any foreign consulate or embassy reception in Victoria Island, and you’d see carefully selected journalists, rights activists and intellectuals displaying a wild, unprompted diarrhoea of the mouth. Over coffee and pastry, glasses of smoothies and imported wine, they talk down on their own country, eager to prove their sophistication by dissecting the pathology of their homeland for the amusement of foreign diplomats.
The consulates, operating with the cold intelligence of old empires, exploit this pathetic penchant for disloyalty and easily conscript these broken ‘patriots’ into willing tools of discord, turning them into agents who spread institutional cynicism under the guise of ‘investigative journalism.’