A rather noisy, distracting, unproductive and foolish
controversy has, for decades now, raged between in
digenes of Cross River and Akwa-Ibom States. It has to do with the well-known claim that the oil palm seedlings which Malaysia used to plant in the early 60s and which have helped it to become the world’s largest producer of palm produce, were got from Nigeria.
Each of the indigenes of the two sister states claim that those famous seedlings were got from their State.
Each time I hear idle chatters from those states making that claim with patriotic fervour, I boil with rage. For I ask myself: what useful purpose is served by that lamentation? Does it really matter from which particular Nigerian soil those palm seedlings were got?
If Nigerians as a whole and citizens of those two states in particular, feel bad that the understudy has become more adept than the master, what useful and reasonable steps have they taken to redress the anomaly?
Will we forever spend useful time lamenting about a reality that took place about 40 years ago? What purpose is being served by our endless lamentation?
It is true that the Malaysians got their seedlings from us. But did they also take away with them our soil, our hands, our legs and our brains?
Early in the life of the administration of Cross River’s Governor Donald Duke, he used to lead rather large delegations of the state’s commissioners, special advisers and special assistants to the Asian Tiger countries, especially Malaysia and Indonesia, ostensibly to understudy their economic miracle.
He used to lead these Mansa Musa-type delegations so frequently and dwell in East Asia for so long that at one point I contemplated writing a piece entitled “Governor Donald Duke: the Ambassador of East Asia to Nigeria.”
I gave him and his young administration the benefit of the doubt and never wrote that piece. But five years on, there is nothing appreciable on ground to show that the thousands of kilometres of costly air travels to East Asia and the millions of dollars spent in staying there, have yielded any dividends for Cross River State.
Whereas one expects that hundreds of thousands, or possibly a million stands, of oil palm trees would have been planted in Cross River State by today in an effort to regain our position from Malaysia, there is nothing on ground to suggest that the Governor and his battery of entourage to Malaysia, take the Malaysian challenge seriously.
Given the hype that the Duke administration’s economic strategy for the development of Cross River State will be anchored on plantation agriculture with emphasis on oil palm, one truly expects that by today, several hectares of land would have been under cultivation with that very useful magic economic tree. But that is not the case at all.
Meanwhile, in the sister state of Akwa-Ibom, Governor Obong Victor Attah is spending a disproportionate share of his gubernatorial time on resource control to the neglect of planting oil palm which he will not have to fight with anybody for its control. In this his second term, his main pre-occupation now is struggling to be Vice-President to a presidential candidate that has not even emerged yet.
While those chief executives who are in a position to do something about the resuscitation of the oil palm business are doing nothing, their citizens are endlessly debating from which particular soil the seedlings were taken by the Malays, as if that really matters.
But this is hardly the only area which one hears unhelpful lamentation about our plight and no sensible action is taken to remedy the situation.
Since 1978 when I started reading newspapers with understanding, during the yearly October 1 independence anniversary celebration in which columnists, features writers and editorialists engage in “sober reflection”, I have always read articles lamenting that our Defence Industry Corporation in Kaduna and its counterpart in Brazil started at about the same time but that while the one in Brazil has been producing planes, ours is engaged in the production of furniture!
I have read this kind of jeremiad in the past 26 years and I am certain that come October 1 this year, somebody is going to remind us of this fact.
The amazing thing about this lamentation is that no one has deemed it fit to accept the challenge of doing something about it.
We have all become professional lamentators. Perhaps, we enjoy the music of our mournful tunes! Or else some of our dirges would have become tiresome and irritating to our ears.
Sometime last year before the ban on the importation of 41 items was imposed, I heard the President himself lamenting the fact that there were over 30 different brands of tootpaste in the Nigerian market.
What I told myself in the quiet of my bedroom is that if the President of the most powerful country in black Africa can not do something about a situation he himself has identified as unsavoury for his country, then only God himself can mercifully save us.
Any one who is past the age of innocence in this country realises the enormous harm bribery and corruption has done to us. Yet, every day we keep lamenting about this twin evil and do nothing about it.
The fashionable thing every body does is to blame it on “our leadership”. Our leaders are so corrupt that the followership has no option but to be corrupt also, is the logic one hears every day.
Those who put this line of argument tend to believe that some how, God will punish the so-called leadership and exonerate the so-called followership. But if God is the God I know, no one, no matter how self-righteous or self-exonerating he or she sounds, will escape God’s judgement.
The other day, a cousin was relating to me how one of his lecturers in the University spends about half of his lecturing hours to lament how the government of Obasanjo has made education so expensive that the children of the poor will be denied it.
After that lengthy lamentation about the evils of the government, he the lecturer then said that since the government people steal money using their privileged positions, he as a lecturer, has no option but to also devise a way of getting his own share of the national cake. He then told the students that from thence henceforth, the students in his department must pay what he called “lecturers’ registration fee” to him in addition to other sundry, often illegal, fees paid to various authorities in the school.
It is like saying that if government is whipping students and parents with horse whips, lecturers too are right to add scorpion stings to the punishment.
Our lecturer friend probably wants us to view him as a revolutionist who is unhappy with the present decadent system and who is a champion of the poor masses. But his subsequent action marks him out as an oppressive opportunist who merely waits for his time and excuse to strike.
Many Nigerians harbour the illusion that once they spend valuable time blaming others for the evils in our land and excusing themselves, then the problem is solved.
But I have always maintained that anybody who feels strongly enough about the ills in our society and spends time voicing out those feelings has an obligation to do something POSITIVE about the matter.
For instance, I have come to a personal decision that if I hear that all my leaders in the executive, legislative and judicial arms are engaged in adultery and fornication, I will not use that as a justification to entice my neighbour’s wife or daughter. Rather, I am resolved that in spite of their own action, I will keep myself pure.
I personally think that this kind of resolution is, ultimately, the only way we can rid our society of the evils and weaknesses we spend so much time lamenting about. No one, I think, has the moral right to lament about bribery and corruption when he himself still gives and receives bribe. For if all of us decide not to give or receive bribe, bribery will die a natural death.
This potentially great nation has remained underdeveloped and poor largely because it has a majority of citizens who are hypocritical and unserious. They waste so much time mourning when all that is needed is to take a firm personal decision which requires discipline, firmness, integrity and patriotism.
Next time you hear a Nigerian blame “our leaders” for all the woes of the country, ask him what positive and concrete personal steps he has taken to solve whatever ill he is complaining about.
No one has a right to feel exonerated merely because he has a gift for talking which he uses to blame everybody else but himself.
Great nations are built by citizens who decide that rather than perennially curse the darkness, the way out is to light a candle. This nation seems in short supply of those who want to light a candle rather than bemoan the darkness. How sad.
