NIGERIA’S CHALLENGE: CRUDE MINDS, NOT CRUDE OIL
I came to work around 6:00am today (quite early?) and was forced to take a walk pending the time the office would be opened; the weather was conducive for creative thinking. After spending ample time to reminisce over my aspirations and achievements as it relates to the new Nigerian dream, my creative intelligence unit was activated as if to say that I caught an idea. So I decided to carefully go down memory lane on where Nigeria is coming from, where we are as a people and what tomorrow holds for our beloved nation.
Today marks my 365th day since I joined the nation’s petroleum industry prime-mover, NNPC as a staff. It was like a dream come true the day I received my job offer letter, not really because of the benefits associated with the employment, particularly in a country where to be an oil-worker is synonymous to being a moneybag, but because I believe it would serve as a viable place for me to nurture and harness my intellectual potential and capacity towards the development of my nation.
Life begins when a man, having discovered his potentials for living, decides to effectively deploy it for the good of another. Suffice it to say then that you start to exist the day you are born, but start to live when you start engaging your potential in the direction of your purpose. Hence, several people pass away never having lived.
I say this because in my workplace, all I do, say or think now gravitates towards my most dominant passion, THE NEW NIGERIA. I am one of the few who still believe that something good is coming out of the giant of Africa. Even though, right now as it is, a huge percentage of the Nigerian youths is simply existing.
You would agree with me that Nigeria has witnessed several socio-political and economic dispensations that have contributed obviously to bringing her to this present state through several reforms (though most of which has successfully deformed us). That crude oil is the lifeblood of the Nigerian economy cannot be gainsaid, or how else would one portray the situation where as much as 95% of a nation’s foreign exchange earnings come from crude oil.
Countless number of articles has been published, most criticizing the leaderships of the country both past and present, overemphasizing the problems and challenges that we are faced with as a nation and never proffering solutions, only a minute fraction has displayed fairly tolerable attitude by critiquing and not just criticizing.

Of major concern is the gamut of debates about our decision in the past to move from agriculture to crude oil exploration and production. To some, the transition from Green Revolution to Oil boom as in the long-run resulted into economic stagnancies. Others bluntly refer to the oil boom of the fifties as a curse or indirectly attribute the problems facing the nation today to the discovery of oil at Oloibiri, to the extent that a veteran author once jocularly insinuated that oil boom be spelt, ‘o-i-l-d-o-o-m’.
But I would like to posit right here that I am not convinced yet that the crude oil boom of the 50’s is responsible for our present unhappiness. Totally predicating our situation of poor infrastructures, youth restiveness, lawlessness, abject poverty etc on crude oil as it were, is simply outrageous and what I would simply call claptrap, because is like blaming the cobwebs and letting the spiders alone.
I realized from adequate study and research into economies that have worked and are still working that the fate of any nation starts from the mind of the citizenry. In the words of Stephen Bantu Biko, a noted nonviolent anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s, ‘the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.’ This statement is very remarkable because for as long as you have a negative mental attitude about yourself, family, work, nation, name it, you can never truly become the definition of greatness that God wants you to be. Without a doubt, your mind determines your kind. Your mentality determines your personality. If you lose it in your mind, then you can never win it in the reality. If there is anything that we, Nigerians, need to change is our faulty mindset, the one that constantly emphasizes the nothingness of our fatherland and if there is anytime for us to begin it is now.
It depends on whose hands it is in, a loaf of bread in my hands would probably make me a sandwich but the same in the hands of our Lord Jesus fed 5000 people, a basketball in my hands would probably earn me a good work-out but the same in the hands of Michael Jordan is worth over 13 million dollars. It does not matter whatever it is, besides crude oil that generates huge amount of revenue, if the mind of the Nigerian man is not re-configured for proper reception and utilization then it would only leave us worse than before. This ultimately imposes a huge responsibility on everyone of us, we should stop blaming anyone for any mishap, bearing in mind that the first and only person you need to change is you, yes YOU. I am bold to say that the Nigerian challenge is not because of crude oil but because of crude mind.
If we can subdue our egotistical tendencies and be real for once, we would realize that the great future of our nation can only be witnessed by a people who are willing to sacrifice, with the help of God, their time, resources and talents for this just cause. In time, we shall be in position to bestow on our nation the greatest possible gift – a more human face.