During a brief trip to London last week, I discovered that the news buzz was all about Mandamusa’s prediction that Nigeria—along with Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey—had prospects of becoming one of the world’s biggest economies over the next three decades. On Thursday, Peter Okwoche of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) ended a short interview on my new novel, Foreign Gods, Inc., by asking what I thought the rosy prediction.
Lacking the time to offer a detailed and nuanced response, I stated that Nigeria is endowed with extremely bright people, that the country is full of energetic and industrious men and women. I then added that the country has never been lucky in its leadership. Finally, I invoked Chinua Achebe’s dour—but hardly contestable—conclusion that Nigeria has an amazing facility for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
This is not the first time Nigeria has been mentioned enthusiastically in prognoses of dramatic economic growth. Again and again, experts, foreign and home-bred, have foretold that Nigeria was on the cusp of becoming a stupendous economic miracle. With each new prediction, many Nigerians, especially those who presume to be “leaders,” would go into a tizzy of celebration, as if the word potential was interchangeable with reality, as if promise were the equal of performance. Each time, in the end, the outcome was embarrassing. Rather than rise to its potential, Nigeria always found a way to stay stuck in the mud of failure, of mediocrity, romancing its worst nightmares.
Nigerians are all-too aware that their country is a huge graveyard, a cemetery littered with betrayed dreams, dashed hopes, and asphyxiated aspirations. They’re familiar with many dud promissory notes that came with such flamboyant names or phrases as “Green Revolution,” “Consolidating the Gains of SAP,” “Vision 2020-10,” “NEEDS,” “Dividends of Democracy,” and “Transformational Leadership.”
Greatness hardly ever comes by accident, nor is it imposed by divinity on an unwilling people. A country, like a person, must prepare—be prepared—for greatness. It starts with dreaming greatness, imagining it, contemplating what it must take, and deciding that the venture is worth the risk, that we’re willing to invest the time, intellect and material resources to translate the dreamed into reality.
Do Nigerians dreamed big? In words, they do, but not in deed. In the 1960s through the 1980s, Nigerian “leaders” used to speak of “this great nation of ours.” But even they have abandoned that species of bad joke! Now, they speak of “moving the nation forward” or “delivering the dividends of democracy.” But the rickety molue they claim to be moving forward is in reverse gear, headed, any moment, for a jagged gorge. Ask any Nigerian official what “dividends” they have delivered and you’re bound to hear such fatuous lines as, “I purchased 100 tractors to mechanize agriculture,” “I don’t owe civil servants any arrears of salaries,” “I bought chalks for all elementary schools in my state,” “I have commissioned 500 water boreholes,” etc, etc.
It’s the 21st century, but very little of the language of those who run (that is, ruin) Nigeria suggests that they are aware of what Time it is. They’re conscious of the world, of course, but only in a slavish, opportunistic way. They, their relatives and cronies are at their best when they travel in style to the world’s most dazzling cities: New York, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Beijing, etc. They unleash their consumerist impulse, eager to savor the most garish of each city’s sensual offerings. But it never occurs to them that the goods that make them swoon, the services they lust after are products of other thinking people’s imagination and work. who run Nigeria are aware of n It’s not a mark of a they “Luck can only carry a person or a nation so far. And Nigeria has long exhausted its stock of luck—but somehow keeps finding some more. It’s a country fueled by sheer, inexplicable luck. The place doesn’t make Truth be told: Nigeria is already a miracle-in-progress. Ibrahim Babangida, one of its former military dictators, famously confessed his surprise that the whole entity had not collapsed. A country whose Mandamusa’s prediction
