Nigeria Content Online

What
shall it profit a country if its musicians amass a dozen KORAs and
Grammys, or its banks overrun West Africa and Wall Street, or its
soccer teams monopolise FIFA’s trophies – while its citizens continue
to import light-bulbs and toothpicks from China?

How truly great is
a land whose roads are devoid of locally-made automobiles, because,
like the ghost workers in its civil service and the invisible power
plants that dot its territory, the made-at-home automobile remains a
ghost invention; a sheaf of mildewed sketches filed away in
long-forgotten frustration.

At least twice
since its inception, the NLNG-funded Nigeria Prize for Science has gone
un-awarded because of the low quality of entries. One year the judges
found homemade bottles of wine among the entries.

Yet, every year
thousands of people bag basic and advanced degrees in the technological
sciences in our universities; their diplomas certified by professors
who own two sets of notes – yellowed, dog-eared notes for their
longsuffering students; and PowerPoint 2010 files for their foreign
fellowships and lecture circuits.

We talk
confidently of Vision 20/2020 – taking our place in the world’s top 20
economies by the year 2020 (as a replacement for the ill-fated visions
of the past), and go on to make noise about owning the world’s
second-largest movie industry; failing to realise that India’s status
as an emerging global power depends far less on Bollywood than on
Bangalore. For while culture and the arts certainly have a role to play
in positioning a country in an increasingly contested global economic
space, depending solely on them without making any effort to exploit
our technological capacity will be akin to seeking to win a soccer game
without leaving your own goal area.

Somehow we miss
the fact that what will count the most for our reputation and our
economy will be what we can contribute to the global(ised) production
pool – in brain drain-free human talent, and in tangible, useful,
technological resource.

Philip Emeagwali
explains it in his “Africa must produce or perish” speech: “A $100 bar
of raw iron is worth $200 when forged into drinking cups in Africa,
$65,000 when forged into needles in Asia, $5 million when forged into
watch springs in Europe. How can this be? European intellectual capital
– the collective knowledge of its people – allows a $100 raw iron bar
to command a 50,000-fold increase!”

The Asians are
competing head-to-head with the West in the area of innovative
technology. China is busy creating and exporting new technology. We
depend on them for our power generators, our standing fans, and our
affordable brand-new cars. The Indians have made history with the
cheapest car in the world, the “Nano”built by Tata Motors, an Indian
company that in 2008 acquired from Ford two British icons: the Jaguar
and Land Rover brands. Someday, very soon, the Nano will swarm our
streets and, in the hands of Nigeria’s
‘let-us-buy-now-for-tomorrow-we-may-be-gone’ masses, become the mobile equivalents of ‘I better pass my neighbor’ generators.

The same Indians
are busy establishing their country as the outsourcing capital of the
world, unsettling the Western IT establishment. Brazil is leading the
ethanol revolution and becoming a biofuel superpower – more than half
of its cars now run on ethanol. Iran, Pakistan, Korea -and even Libya –
are (even though controversially) trying their hands at nuclear
technology. Every country that wishes to be taken seriously is busy –
creating, producing, fine-tuning.

We are also busy, but waiting; for the rest to produce so we can consume.

“Relax o
compatriots; Importers’ call obey!” might well be the new opening line
of the Nigerian national anthem. In the long wait for the ports to
discharge their treasures we remember to entertain ourselves: speeches,
slogans, schemes and strategies a-plenty.

Unfortunately we
will not wake up in 2020 to find that we have become a superpower. We
will realise too late that superpowers jettison faith in the false
comforts of rhetoric, and instead stay awake and at work. We will also
realise that superpowers need super-leaders, visionaries who can see
beyond Abuja’s next ‘allocation’.

On May 25, 1961,
John F. Kennedy shared, before a joint session of the United States
Congress, his vision of having the United States put a man on the moon
before the end of the decade. “I believe that this nation should commit
itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a
man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” he said.

Two and half years
later Kennedy was dead. But not his dream. Because, depending on the
country, dreams don’t have to die when dreamers do. Ask Martin Luther
King.

But not Obafemi Awolowo.