Something terrible has happened and is still happening to our national psyche as a people. Under the misrule of General Buhari, Nigeria has now become a place of desperation.
Our population is expanding. 16,000 babies are born every day in Nigeria. Annually, 6 million people are added to our numbers. Our population growth rate is 3%. Yet, under Buhari, our economy is barely growing and has in some cases during the time in review, actually shrunk in size (a recession).
In 2020, our GDP growth rate was -1.8% (negative 1.8%, meaning that it shrank). The African Development Bank projects that our GDP grew by just 1.5% last year (that is half the rate at which our population grew).
And with these sad realities, we have an administration that is increasing its budgetary spending on itself and its appointees/cronies (the cost of governance in Nigeria has increased by more than 40% under Buhari. Meanwhile, the budgetary spending on human development as a percentage of total budgeting has been reduced by more than 20%.
And not only has the Buhari administration squandered our present resources, but they have put future generations in bondage by borrowing so much that China has had to take the extraordinary measure of refusing further lending to Nigeria.
This administration met a total debt of ₦12 trillion. Today, Nigeria owes ₦40 trillion, with Buhari promising to borrow $12 billion more before his inglorious exit in 2023. So bad has the situation become that Nigeria now spends more on debt servicing than she does on actual infrastructure.
The end result of more people struggle for less resources is a population that has become so desperate, that people are now willing to do almost anything to get money, fulfilling the Scriptural prophecy that Christ gave in Matthew 24:12 to the effect that “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.”
Ritual killings and skull mining has now become so rampant in Nigeria that hardly a day goes by without a sad headline referencing these atrocities in the media.
From five year old Hanifa Abubakar in Kano, to three year old Aminu Bukar In Jigawa, to the unfortunate girlfriend who was beheaded for money rituals in Ogun by her lover and two of his friend, to the young Imo teenager, who was caught in the act as he tried to kill his mother in pursuit of a money ritual. Buhari’s misrule had turned Nigeria into a nation of desperadoes.
And it is not just rituals. Nigerians no longer have an appetitive for any investment that can’t yield unimaginable interests in a matter of weeks.
Three million Nigerians lost ₦18 billion to the MMM Ponzi scheme in 2017. If you ask those same three million people to invest that money in the S&P 500 and get a sure 8% return on investment, many, if not most of them would have scoffed at you. I have experienced it in my free MasterClasses. As a people, easy money is a national disease we must cure!
If you had asked the majority of those three million Nigerians who lost ₦18 billion to MMM in 2017 to invest in #Bitcoin, they would have said crypto is too risky. Today, Bitcoin is ten times its 2017 value, while ponzi MMM disappeared faster than Buhari’s integrity. Risk is better than greed!
It is not that Nigerians are a bad people. We are not. We have just been put under unimaginable pressure by a government that is so useless to the extent that they turned the third fastest growing economy in the world in 2015, according to CNNMoney, to the world headquarters for extreme poverty.
And poverty has consequences. It makes people more likely to commit crimes. It gives them little choices in life. The terrorism and insecurity Nigeria is facing is as a result of the uselessness of our government in improving conditions of life for the people. And this has created an environment where terrorists are able to recruit.
The sad reality is that Nigerians are the architect of their present sufferings. By electing a man who is not much better than a stark illiterate, we are paying the price of being led by the worst of us. And until Buhari is democratically ousted, very little will change!
He will continue to build that $2 billion railway to Niger Republic with money borrowed in Nigeria’s name nonetheless. And when that badly needed money is not spent developing our infrastructure, and improving our economy, Nigerians will get more and more desperate. And that desperation will continue until we have a separation of Buhari from Aso Rock.
This vicious cycle will continue until we are able to grow our economy at a faster rate than our economy. If not, we are going to experience an ever worsening Malthusian crisis.
And the only way we can rein in our population is by educating Nigerians, especially Northern Nigerians.
Buhari thinks his various schemes of handing out cash to Nigerians via programmes like NPower will halt the drift, but it won’t. Because, people are poor more out of lack of wisdom than out of lack of capital. For example, if you give most poor people a hen today, they will eat it. They will not wait for it to lay eggs. And tomorrow, they will beg for eggs from a man who waited for his hen to lay eggs.
It is the same thing with money. If you give many poor people $1000 and return in a week, you will find them with a new iPhone, or another new consumer item they do not need. The whole idea behind their poverty is their mentality. They have a consumer mentality, not a producer mentality
If you want to become wealthy, you must have the mentality of consuming what you produce. It is called a prosumer mindset. A prosumer is someone who consumes what he produces. When I traveled around Asia, I developed a respect for their prosumer ability.
And it is only possible to have a prosumer mentality when you are educated. This is why I have consistently suggested that Nigeria should focus on education. And not just any type of education. Our focus should be on STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
Most of the courses on offer in Nigerian universities are irrelevant and have expired in the year 2022. Nigeria is a developing country. We do not need millions of student studying liberal arts courses. We need science, technology, engineering and mathematics. That is what we should be subsidising. Not fuel. Certainly not fuel.
The kinds of courses on offer at Nigerian universities and the curricula at lower education levels only end up indoctrinating Nigerian youths to think like workers and employees. Our education system does not teach our children how to make money. Rather, it teaches them how to be dependent on government.
And when you have a government as ineffectual as Buhari’s government, the problems caused by the inadequacies of our educational system only grows worse.
And that is all the more reason why our youths are engaging in these very shameful and satanic vices.
Nigeria must revolutionise her educational system. We are no longer in the colonial era where the British needed court clerks and office boys. We are now living in a knowledge worker age. And if we do not revamp and overhaul our educational system, the world will be making trillions from mining Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, while we will only be mining skulls in a futile bid to make money from fetish and occult practices.
Nigeria is graduating too many sociologists, philosophers, theatre arts, linguistics, mass communicators, psychologists (not psychiatrists) and other liberal arts. We are a developing country. Those courses are luxuries. We must encourage our youths to focus on STEM education if we are to develop!
STEM is what has taken China from second world to first world in less than fifty years. India is now be editing from their forty year old focus on STEM. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. Let us learn from others who have escaped the situation we now find ourselves in.
Education that prepares young Nigerians to be entrepreneurs or makes them so highly skilled that jobs will look for them is what we desperately need if we want to stem the tide of ritual killings and skull mining, which are in themselves symptoms of the endemic, systemic, and generational poverty that exists in Nigeria.
Reno’s Nuggets
Your father did not leave anything for you, so you too don’t want to leave for your children. Has it ever occurred to you that your father did not leave anything for you because his own father left nothing for him? If you don’t break the cycle, your lineage may be poor forever!
Even if you don’t have money or assets to leave to your children, at least get life insurance. That way, when you die (we will all die one day if Christ tarries), your children will have a windfall. Life insurance is not expensive. And if you are afraid that your children will kill you, keep it a secret from them.
Reno Omokri
Gospeller. Deep Thinker. #1 Bestselling author of Facts Versus Fiction: The True Story of the Jonathan Years. Avid traveller. Hollywood Magazine Film Festival Humanitarian of the Year, 2019.
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