Harvesting The Promise of Nigeria
A Speech by Nze Akachukwu Nwankpo
Greetings.
Nigeria is Great Gift of God
May I invite all of you here to join me in giving gratitude to God for the singular privilege he has granted for making me a Nigerian.
I am convinced beyond doubt that being a Nigerian is the greatest blessings and an amazing privilege which God has granted each and every one of us in this room who is a Nigerian citizen. I do not know what we’ve done to deserve this precious gift, but every time I have allowed the immensity of this gift of being a Nigerian to fully dawn on me, I have been astonished by how less deserving of it I am. I am humbled by it, and I’m eternally grateful to God for being part of this heritage. Let me once more invite you to be grateful that you are a Nigerian.
The Promise of Nigeria
When I was told by Linus Okoli, the amazing young man behind GOTNI that I was going to be speaking to a group of young and emerging Nigerians on a topic of my choice, I chose ‘Harvesting the Promise of Nigeria’. In choosing this topic, I was driven by the hope that today, I will lead you to a practice of daily gratitude to God for being a Nigerian. I chose the topic ‘Harvesting the Promise Nigeria’ in the hope that I will open your eyes and widen your appreciation of the tremendous promise that is yours to take and run with just because you are born Nigerian. It is my hope today that by pointing out to you, the harvest that can be yours in the promise that is Nigeria, I will fan the embers of your youth to the point where it will catch fire and make you leap out of your being with great and unyielding energy in an unrestrained commitment to use that youthful energy in finding ways of harvesting the promise of Nigeria. May I once more invite you to be grateful that you are a Nigerian.
Understanding the Promise
As I woke up today aware that I was going to speak to you, my thoughts were taken over by how immense the gift of Nigeria is. I paced around my room and thought about what one can do with 140 million people, just think about what you can do with a market made up of 140 million buyers! It is amazing. If you can find a way to give these 140 million people the ability to pay for their basic needs. If you are bold enough to find a way to give these 140 million people the capacity to go above paying for their basic needs and pay for their wants, for their joys and for their laughter. If you allow yourself the courageous act to find a way to give these 140 million people the buying power for their fantasies. Can you imagine what promise this holds. What promise Nigeria holds in our ability to afford our basic needs, our wants, our fantasies, our joys and laughter. For me, it is awesome.
If you allow your thoughts to go past the 140 million and take in the landscape of Nigeria, you see a country that has the ocean at one end and the desert at the other. Between the desert and the ocean is the savanna and the rain forest. We have the plains and the hills, the rivers, the lakes and the waterfalls. In our weather, we have the cold Jos, the hot Maiduguri, the cool Enugu, the rains of Lagos and Rivers. With little or no natural hazards, Nigeria is gifted with one of the best natural environments in the world.
Allow your mind to wander a bit from the natural environment and take in the variety of edible fruits, nuts and tubers that grow and blossom all over Nigeria. There is no single period in Nigeria we do not have a large variety of edible fruits, nuts, tubers, grains, vegetables growing largely unattended by human care.
There are some places in this country that you just have to blow the dust out of the surface and you’ll see precious materials waiting to be harnessed. While in some places, natural springs flows unrestrained, waiting to be bottled and sold. More ridiculous is when you dig a little deeper beneath the surface, you’ll be welcomed by countless minerals and resources as gold, silver, crude, coal, steel, natural gas, … Snaking between these places are inland water ways for easy access and mobility. When you have all these things, I see no reason why you should not be grateful. Let me once more invite you to be grateful.
The Color of Rusting Gold
My late friend, Professor Esiaba Irobi, in his book, The Color of Rusting Gold, says that when gold rusts, the color is red. Nigeria today tells the story of a generation of explorers who found a heap of gold in a distant land, and then chose greed and negligence to mine the gold. The pitiable result of greed and negligence mining gold is that the gold will rust from inside. Nigeria like rusting gold is dripping with the painful color of blood dripping into our streets in our miserable statistics of hunger, child mortality, illiteracy, homelessness, stealing of public funds, months of darkness without electricity, bad roads, unemployment, mockery from international body, ethnic wars, and even the recent unexplained bombings. In the midst of this dance of greed and negligence, people from other country come and have a bazar, grabbing hold of what they wish and will and stuffing the noses and belly of our privileged brethren in the process. There is nothing to celebrate in the way and manner we have handled this precious gift of God. Despite the failure of past generations and our long history of decadence, God in his infinite mercies has still left us with this gift undepleted. ** So I say to you: we should and must be grateful.
Great Visitors to Edorado
What astonishes me is that Nigerians do understand what a harvested promise looks like. They flock away to London, US, China, Dubai as visitors to Edorado.
Since we know what good life is, and we go around the world basking in the glory of other peoples lives, what stops us from doing the same for ourselves. Why are we stuck in amazingly unproductive thinking, why are we so occupied with what divides us instead of focusing all our creative energy on what unites us. Today, I want to invite you to a daily contemplation of what can come out of harvesting the promise of Nigeria. Dream about it, soak yourself up in it. Why cant we take the waters of the mambela and pour it on the savanna belt Nigeria, and see how much rice, millet beans, groundnut that can come out of it.
Why can’t we combine the dance beats of Benue and combine it with the mkpokiti dance of the south east and make movies out of it.
The Time is Now, The Task is Yours
If the generations past did not see this promise, you cannot afford to be blind to it. I beckon you to wake up from this bad dream and open your eyes and your being to a new horizon of gratitude, commitment and result. We have a President in the State House who is looking for citizens. Citizens who are ready to put aside our differences, real or imagined and focus our collective creative energies on using the many gifts from God to our nation to harvest Nigeria’s promise. By our collective efforts we can create a paradise proportionate to and even better than the ones we often flock towards in other nations. The time is now, the task is ours- Let us harvest our promise.
A Speech by Nze Akachukwu S. Nwankpo at the Emerging Leaders Conference hosted by Guardians of the Nation International (GOTNI) in Collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Youth Development delivered on 14th December 2011.
Nze Akachukwu is the Special Adviser to Mr. President on Technical Matters
