HOW THE NIGERIAN ELITE UNDERDEVELOPED NIGERIA

The favorite past time of the educated African elite is finger pointing. We love to point fingers in all direction but to ourselves. We blame everyone else for our failings but ourselves. We enjoy narrating how everyone else is victimising and marginalising us but we never raise constructive fingers against the perpetuation of our victim status. We are very good at analysing what happened to us in the past but fail woefully in charting a path to a future of sustainable development. We escape from our realities by weaving conspiracy theories about how others want to keep us in bondage. We fail to acknowledge that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. The fault is also not that of those conspiring to keep you down. If you agree to be kept down, you will remain down.

I was made to read Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" in 1982 as a standard text of comparative economics in my first year at the department of Political Science, UNN. As a starry eyed student it was mind blowing, especially when you combine it with Chinweizu's, "The West and the Rest of Us", which was another compulsory text. The two books then provided us with alternative viewpoints as to why Africa is underdeveloped. Justifiably we were filled with righteous indignation about what the West did to us. We blamed the colonialist policy of the West for everything that went wrong with us and I agree. My opinion started changing when I observed that the Asian Tiger countries have taken responsibility for their lives and are taking significant strides into the future. Then it dawned on me that the fault was actually not in our stars.

In Nigeria today, there are significant challenges in every sector you turn to. Now is the time for us to make contributions to nation building, rather than finger pointing. 

After Walter Rodney's "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", it is also about time for one of us to write a book on "How the Nigerian Educated Elite Underdeveloped Nigeria"