Politics is dead
No spectacular moves or policy changes by any politician now or in the future will make a dent in the living standards of Nigerians.
See example:
Politics has no role to play in, and is not the answer, to, Nigeria’s development.
I say that clearly and categorically, and it can be challenged by those who find it a shocking statement.
Politics will not solve Nigeria’s problems.
Not at scale, anyway.
You can change leaders and do elections all we want.
We are just wasting time: generations will live and die, and Nigeria will sink further into this directionless, multidimensional, extreme poverty.
The days are gone when politics could have been the answer.
Maybe the 60s & 70s? The morass is now so multifaceted, so insidious and so ubiquitous, that we lack the political culture and capital to intervene.
It’s far, far too late.
The one thing that can transform Nigeria developmentally, is direct economic change.
No political actors required.
The people will have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.
Here’s what we must do.
Multiply or scale businesses.
Two types of business: big business and Micro, Small, and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs).
Core example of big business is Dangote. The billionaire example.
There are several other Nigerian billionaires but he’s the one in the news. Nigeria needs to multiply Dangote in 6 places. Dangote is metaphor.
Every geopolitical zone needs one Dangote. That billionaire, or even, a conglomerate of billionaires, since we are not short of them, must focus their investments on building the local economy of their region.
Yes, I recognize that the concept of ‘billionaire’ itself, is core capitalist, oligarchic, and in that sense, designed primarily for cheap extraction and exploitation, and somewhat at odds with building non-private wealth …but, stay with me.
At this moment, all Nigeria’s billionaires and elites are neocolonial crony capitalists. Their profits build private accounts and add to economies in Europe, America and the Middle East. These Nigerian billionaires are not investing for the sake of Nigeria. They may have a Nigerian footprint but their profits are banked in the colonial core, serving our colonizers and building wealth for others.
Not for Nigerians. We just get the crumbs.
But, do you know why South Africa is the largest economy? Because South African billionaires invest in South African business.
Now to be fair, they are not more patriotic than Nigerians. But, it works in their favor because they own that economy, so whatever they invest is eventually their own.
Nigerian billionaires do not own Nigeria’s economy. No incentive for them to invest in what is not theirs. South African billionaires are mostly white. The South African economy is still 85 percent white owned. Even when they move their capital to Europe and America, like Elon Musk, it’s still white ownership.
Though Elon Musk is a particularly poor example because ideologically he doesn’t consider himself African at all and doesn’t actually invest in South Africa itself, in fact, is presently at war with his home government.
The point is, the whiteness of those billionaires is an important point to understand their incentive in exploiting South Africa’s natural wealth. They build a closed economy that only a 5-percenter racial hegemon have control over.
Yet, most black South Africans remain poor. Still, the white led investment in south Africa’s economy counts towards South Africa’s economic rating. Egypt has a similar story, but these are Arab billionaires, and the 2nd largest African economy.
Like them, Nigeria’s billionaires, being as a group, the only black billionaires on the continent, must discover the Nigerian economy for themselves and turn inwards.
Time up for remaining in business only as neocolonial cronies and tools of Nigerian underdevelopment.
Nigeria needs one Dangote, or a conglomerate of billionaires like him, to focus on developing each of our six geopolitical zones.
Dangote himself needs to decide whether he wants to focus on the Lagos or south west zone, where he currently dominates, or move to the north west where he’s originally from, and replicate what he’s done, but this time with a geopolitical objective.
The same must happen in South east, south south, north central and north east.
Investments can be made in any and every sector directly related to actual development.
Agriculture. Infrastructure. Energy. Health. Education.
Imagine if instead of one American themed university where children of the er, elite, are prepared for export to the global market, billionaire Atiku had a Nigeria focused university in his north east home zone, where there’d a direct pipeline from the curriculum to that region’s economic opportunities?
More interesting - Nigeria’s highest out of school rates are in that region.
Make it make sense.
But neocolonial crony capitalism will not allow us to do for ourselves, as Malcolm X famously taught.
Imagine if Otedola or Adenuga created a southwest economic model. Lagos is already a captive market. Think for me.
Or, if Arthur Eze or Innoson created an energy or tech sector in the already entrepreneur advanced, manufacturing ready south east.
Jim Ovia and Tony Elumelu are from Delta. Think for me. The possibilities.
Even if the best known billionaires from North central mostly made their money from “politics”, still, think for me. North east is sitting on trillions of naira worth in steel production, hydro electric power and agriculture.
Think for me.
Stop. Don’t tell me, “but government won’t allow them”.
That’s the problem. What is the solution?
Nigeria has abundant billionaires. Only God knows what they’re doing with their money. Probably sitting in one corner complaining, while praying to God for solutions and patronizing politicians for crony access.
That’s why analysts say Nigeria has no true elites, because the level of thinking of our rich people is no different from our poor people.
We are all exactly poor in spirit, empty in our souls, void of revolutionary ideology, with no scalable solutions to generations of bottom barrel survivalism.
No country on earth ever developed because of its politicians.
Check history. America had its Roosevelts & Vanderbilts.
None of that wealth was ethical. It was all stolen and exploited, mostly from black bodies, but also from their lower classes.
But still, they built something in America.
Not JFK, nor Jefferson, nor any good president.
Industrialists built America.
Europe had its Rothschilds, Grosvenors, Agnellis.
Notorious they may have been, but their money is still maiming money for the larger economy, today, and Europe is built around that industrialization.
Ambani, Lee (Samsung), Yiming (Tiktok) and several more Asian Tigers define Asia and the world as we know it.
These are not politicians, but they build Industries that produce today’s global corporations. The so-called Industrial Revolutions, all 4, are creditable not to any political class, but to men and women like these.
Their taxes go to government. That’s how politics can benefit directly from business and industrial development.
Nigeria and Africans must stop looking to any politicians or elections.
A time should come very soon when politics is so mundane and of such little interest that it no longer attracts heated competition, but is left to men and women who truly have a calling.
Not lackeys or charlatans, not small minds, or mediocre men, but true politicians who want to build the sorts of social and generational cultures and structures politicians should be genuinely responsible for.
As for our national development and the economy in particular, it is in our own hands. We the people. And, our billionaire class.
Let the billionaire class stop being cronies, go to work and unlock the engines of the economy we want.
Free up capital for the small and medium scale entrepreneurs to run wild and free.
Seed our communities with scalable investments at household level.
We will empower ourselves. No one is coming to save us. Neither God nor man. We must look away from politics, look to business, and learn decolonial, self-interested, geopolitically informed, anti-capitalist, pro African, grassroots economic thinking.
And, scale that, till all 200 billion of us have a hand in our national cake, whether baking or eating, and no one is left behind.