Nigerians this is a terrible way to live piped.video/DXViZlcjx7A

The Nigerian economy cannot be judged by statistics alone. We must ask what these policies mean for the ordinary Nigerian. In Ibadan, I told the story of stopping to fill my tank as I was leaving Lagos. I thought about the reality facing the average Nigerian: what does it mean to earn ₦100,000 or less a month when basic necessities consume such a large share of that income? How can we build a society that cares so little for the weak and the small man? I went to Ibadan with a simple message: we must return government to the people. We need a people-centred government that cares about the welfare of citizens and understands the pressures they face every day. Government cannot look away while Nigerians struggle with the consequences of policies that are not delivering the promised relief. At a time when families are being crushed by the rising cost of living, leadership must be measured by how it improves the lives of ordinary people. The purpose of government is not to make life comfortable for those in power while the people bear the burden. It is to serve the people. Nigeria needs an economy and a government that puts the dignity, welfare and future of its citizens at the centre of public policy.

The concept of to lead is to love may sound mooshy and soft but most great civilizations have been anchored on faith and philosophy of our humanity. Arnold Toynbee, the British historian believes civilizations come on the heels of religious risings. Deep thinking will show that human community is erected in essence on a shared sense of who we are. When a Pope talks of a civilization of love as purpose in public life he not only captures the point of Ghand’s deadly social sins, he anticipates CEOs of AI companies begging for regulation to stop them from making machines that annihilate man. If those who seek power with abuse of the rules of a fair game because they currently have power , think, they may find that they are consumed ultimately by it. With a little love for those they lead they may be spared the terrible day after by following the rules and avoiding the violence that is the bullies last resort.

The women in the Anambra basin who cannot harvest the tubers from the rich alluvial soil of their land because of terrorists, end up living poverty amidst plenty. So why has our politics ‘not cleared the bush’ of their troubles. My recent reflections suggests the missing ingredient is a word that can be easily thought of as out of place here, Love. Narcissistic politicians love self too much to sacrifice for others and for the common good. To lead is to love. To lead with love is to have a heart for solving problems at the bottom of the pyramid.

I spent last week in Geneva at the WTO and elsewhere in Europe laying foundation for a new narrative on Africa and drawing attention to the prejudice premium the international financial system imposes on Africa as it struggles to finance growth. My mission included pushing on the state in Africa to crack the ‘mystery of capital’ to make Africa’s huge assets fungible and become stimulant of investment grade capital. In the 5 days since returning early in the week I have been in Lagos, Uyo, Abuja, Enugu and arrived Nnewi this evening. It struck me as I traveled that Nigerians do not open their eyes enough to see the beauty in the diversity of the country. Around Nimo, in Anambra, my Driver who is from Adamawa and lives Enugu expressed surprise at so many Hausa speaking Northerners in the market when we stopped to confirm we were going the right way. In Uyo we chatted about what we fought about as undergraduates being ideology and how we did it with respect for our differences. The students of Eskor Toyo called me Bourgeoise apologist along with Iyorchia Ayu who would call me and say I want to meet your Bourgeoise friends. And we would all laugh about it. We noted there that the quarrel was about ethnicity and the language bitter hate speech. All this in the face of serious issues like Dave Umahi’s famous concrete road from Enugu to Awka already an ‘Alao and Shaky shaky’ rough ride even though it has not been commissioned, and bandits continue to prevent women in the Anambra from harvesting the tubers they planted.

I spent last week in Geneva at the WTO and elsewhere in Europe laying foundation for a new narrative on Africa and drawing attention to the prejudice premium the international financial system imposes on Africa as it struggles to finance growth. My mission included pushing on the state in Africa to crack the ‘mystery of capital’ to make Africa’s huge assets fungible and become stimulant of investment grade capital. In the 5 days since returning early in the week I have been in Lagos, Uyo, Abuja, Enugu and arrived Nnewi this evening. It struck me as I traveled that Nigerians do not open their eyes enough to see the beauty in the diversity of the country. Around Nimo, in Anambra, my Driver who is from Adamawa and lives Enugu expressed surprise at so many Hausa speaking Northerners in the market when we stopped to confirm we were going the right way. In Uyo we chatted about what we fought about as undergraduates being ideology and how we did it with respect for our differences. The students of Eskor Toyo called me Bourgeoise apologist along with Iyorchia Ayu who would call me and say I want to meet your Bourgeoise friends. And we would all laugh about it. We noted there that the quarrel was about ethnicity and the language bitter hate speech. All this in the face of serious issues like Dave Umahi’s famous concrete road from Enugu to Awka already an ‘Alao and Shaky shaky’ rough ride even though it has not been commissioned, and bandits continue to prevent women in the Anambra from harvesting the tubers they planted.

When we speak about the possibility of a new Nigeria, we must look beyond political slogans and examine the records of those seeking to lead. Peter Obi demonstrated in Anambra state that the government can be deliberate about education, healthcare and the management of public resources. Under Peter Obi's administration classroom blocks were constructed across the state’s 177 communities, mission schools were returned to their churches, and Anambra rose to a high position in NECO results between 2011 and 2013. It was also in Peter Obi's administration that a state-owned teaching hospital which is the Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University Teaching Hospital located at Awka was also established. Alhaji Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso’s record in Kano tells another important story. His administration invested heavily in education too, including thousands of classrooms, free feeding and uniforms for primary pupils, technical and vocational institutions, laboratories and scholarship programmes that supported a lot of young people in Kano state. Both men have experience translating public policy into programmes that affect the lives of Nigerians in positive ways. Peter Obi and Alhaji Rabiu Kwankwaso have chosen to work together because they found substantial common ground in their vision and mission for the good of Nigeria. I believe Nigeria needs leadership that understands production, human capital, fiscal responsibility, education and opportunity. If we are serious about moving Nigeria from poverty to prosperity, we should pay close attention to the possibilities created when experience, competence and a shared national vision come together. The task before us is to build a Nigeria where the government works for the people and where every young Nigerian has a genuine opportunity to achieve greatness. Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso are the ones best suited to lead the way forward.

I have said this before, and I believe it is important to remind Nigerians of my position as we approach 2027. Peter Obi has my support for the presidency. But my position is clear, I am not supporting the idea of Peter Obi becoming somebody else’s Vice President. The day Peter Obi accepts a Vice Presidential position, I will walk away from his corner. I have said this plainly, and I stand by it. My concern is not about personalities. It is about the kind of leadership Nigeria needs and the direction in which we want our country to go. I have also argued that we should begin to rethink the age of those seeking executive office. The Nigerian presidency should not become a retirement home for politicians. I believe there should be a serious national conversation about limiting presidential and gubernatorial candidates to those aged 70 or below. Nigeria needs leadership that is focused on the future, not simply another cycle of political succession. These are principles I have stated publicly, and Nigerians should judge them for themselves.

Sometimes, when you look back at your life, you discover that some of the things you once thought were accidents were, in fact, moments in which the hand of Providence was at work. I recently came across the testimony attributed to DSP Sunday Machibi, a former unit commander of SARS, before the Ikeja High Court. He reportedly told the court that I had been marked for elimination in the dark days of the Abacha years, and that I survived only because members of the team sent to carry out the operation disagreed. Reading that account years later, I can only say one thing: "I thank God for my life" There were forces I could see, and there were dangers I could never have imagined. Yet somehow, I remained alive. Whatever anyone may think of my ideas, my activism, my criticisms of government or the causes to which I have devoted my life, I am grateful that those who may have wished to silence me did not succeed. Life is ultimately a gift we do not manufacture for ourselves. I have been given more years than I could have demanded, more opportunities than I deserved, and more chances to serve than I could have imagined as a young man. So I look back without bitterness. I simply give thanks to God almighty for my life preserved.

So how does a clean-up campaign begin in the twilight of your years? Mo Ibrahim once lamented that only in the madness of Africa does a young population wait for people approaching senility to ask them to seek re-election. Painful as it is to watch your valuables being chopped away by regulatory risk, stolen elections, and the predatory acts of corrupt politicians, there comes a point when age itself imposes certain home truths. At 66, you begin to understand that there are some battles you must fight differently. Politicians borrow recklessly while refusing to cut back on their gravy train. They complain about declining revenues while corruption remains deeply embedded in the system. And ordinary citizens watch, almost helplessly, as the promise of their country is slowly dismantled. I said at 32 that I would not celebrate my 38th birthday still working at VWN. On the very day I was promoted to Deputy Managing Director, I had already made that decision about the direction of my life. Now, at this stage of my journey, I have gone a step further. I have authorized my children to confine me if, after my 70th birthday, they hear that I am running around asking anyone to vote for me. That is how I see the world from this point in my journey. And I remain grateful to everyone who has helped make the journey worthwhile. It has been a remarkable sojourn. But even after all these years, there remains one unbearable pain: watching the promise of creation being stolen from the person who is still waiting to exhale. I cannot breathe. And yet, I am still here, still hoping that somehow, before the final curtain, we may learn to stop stealing tomorrow from those who have not yet had the chance to live it.

Many years ago I described the structure of the Nigerian economy as a feeding bottle economy. I did not then fully anticipate the ramifications of its effect. Rent seeking elite who fastened their lips to the feeding bottle became entitled and also forgot how to create value from which real wealth could be extracted. Their tastes in the material went profligate as they produced less. They became beholden to whoever held the feeding bottle., extant agents of the state. They lost their voices. Agents of the autopilot state could disappear and they would be mute. The inoculation effects of a feeding bottle economy can make a country of prospects a Banana Republic with cheerleaders and a bespectacled spectators in oversight roles

To be fair, Nigeria also gave me a break that Kowit could probably only have dreamed of. I had no godfather. Yet a Vice President who had been reading some of my policy ideas sent for me. Without giving me the slightest hint of what he had in mind, he recommended me to the President. When it was done, he simply told me that the President had approved my appointment to replace one of my professors in a presidential advisory position. Then, not long after, the military returned. And I watched them take Nigeria from the pride of a race to something dangerously close to a laughing stock. Otunba Tunji Lawal-Solarin would repeatedly ask me: “Aburo, what is going on?” I would project what I feared was coming. He would respond: “Haba! It cannot be that bad.” Then, two years later: “Ahhh! It is getting worse than you predicted.” There are many terrible ways to d!e. But perhaps one of the worst is to watch your own slow strangulation by people who profess to love you, while the only love they understand is self-love. You cry, I cannot breathe. They hear you. They simply do not care. Nigeria has had the misfortune of being governed, too often, by people whose attachment to the country has been overwhelmed by their attachment to themselves. That is why, in the run-up to the 2015 elections, I became deeply worried that Nigeria might move from the frying pan into the fire. Otunba looked at me and said: “Aah, aah. But these are your people.” I had already shared the same fears with Emeka Izeze, then Managing Director of The Guardian, and with a few other people I respected. Three months into the new administration, before a cabinet had even been formed, I told Otunba that my worst fears were beginning to look plausible. I told him I feared the government could become a tragedy in Nigerian history. I was not speaking from prophecy. I was simply reading the signs. And once again, I found myself watching the country move in the direction I had feared, while the question returned: How many more possibilities must Nigeria lose before we finally learn to protect them?

Silence greeted my proposal. When I got up to ease myself, I noticed that a member of the parent board, who attended the Nigerian board meetings only occasionally, followed me. In the toilet, Dr Peter Frerk told me he had a confession to make. The impression they had been given in Germany, he said, was that the Nigerians in the company were not particularly smart, but were generally lazy pilferers of company goods, working in a plant that had more coconut trees than cars foreign-exchange allocations allowed it to assemble. Then he said something that stayed with me. My proposal was brilliant. But there was a problem. With Nigeria’s borders repeatedly closing after coups, Germany could not safely depend on a Nigerian plant for components needed in its global production chain. It galled me. But I could not ignore the larger lesson. The government had refused for years to respond to the joint venture’s second capital call. I had eventually used my personal friendship with the then Industries Minister, AVM Mohammed Yahaya, to get the ministry to issue a cheque, rather than waiting for the official government shareholder, Ministry of Finance Incorporated, to act. Frerk also reminded me that Germany had become so frustrated with the joint venture that, by the time I joined, it was trying to persuade Mandilas to buy them out. John Mandilas was not particularly interested. We returned to the meeting. But I kept thinking about Kowit. Thailand had experienced coup after coup too. Yet coups alone could not explain the difference. They mattered, certainly. But Thailand had also benefited from elite consensus and the unifying role of the monarchy. Kowit went home and played his part. I went home too. In 1982, the very day my doctoral dissertation was accepted, I left without even waiting to collect the bound copies. My friend Folu Ogundimu collected them and kept them until I returned months later for commencement. But on that long flight across the Atlantic, I made a pledge to the Big Man in the heavens. I knew I would spend much of my life criticising what was wrong with society. But I did not want to become merely an iconoclast. I did not want to be the intellectual who could diagnose every problem but build nothing. I prayed for the grace to do something, however small, to leave an impact for good in everything I criticised. That prayer has produced a forty-year trail of activity. Programmes for poor widows. Youth and leadership development. Television programmes that have run for 22 years and counting. Academic work across several disciplines. Entrepreneurship initiatives across different sectors of the economy. It has been a long journey. Sometimes, it leaves you feeling strangely alone and lonely in a crowd. Because while you are trying to build, others are still dismantling. While you are trying to create possibilities, they are busy stealing them. And perhaps that is the deepest pain of this long Nigerian journey. It is not merely that they stole opportunities from a country. They kept their knees on the neck of possibility itself, pressing down on the lives we might have lived and the nation we might have built.

When I graduated in 1977, a confident 21-year-old, Nigeria’s output per person was about twice China’s. But some of us were impatient. We could see that military rule was doing more for industrial development in South Korea than it was doing for Nigeria, and we badgered the military about it. As a youth corps member, my voice was loud on these issues. Then I watched Deng Xiaoping replace Mao-era policies with a radically different direction for China. The very day NYSC ended, I boarded a plane for graduate studies in the United States. I would become more precocious there, but also more humbled. I watched China transform until its output per person was many times Nigeria’s. I watched South Korea establish itself as an industrial power. And then, in 2014, on the eve of a regional World Economic Forum, a Nigerian President announced that one measure of our accomplishment was that Nigeria had become the fastest-growing private-jet market in the world. A few years later, Nigeria was being described in global statistics as the poverty capital of the world. For me, these were not merely statistics. They were another chapter in the robbery. Another piece of the possibility of a better life stolen from millions who had continued to believe in the promise of Nigeria held out by the founding fathers. The tragedy is not simply that we failed to become what we could have been. It is that we watched the possibilities disappear while those who had the power to protect them kept making choices that diminished them.

In that same 1974, I met a fine gentleman who had graduated from the University of Ibadan around the time of the anguish that followed the killing of Kunle Adepeju. He was then working with BP, where I had my first vacation-job experience. That encounter became a friendship that has endured all these years. Along the way, it gave me the special privilege of becoming egbon, big brother, to his children. Otunba Tunji Lawal-Solarin has, at every major turn in our national experience since those days, sought me out to ask what I thought was happening to Nigeria and where I believed the trends were taking us. Often, after listening, he would open his mouth in amazement and say: “Aburo, you said this would happen, and it has happened exactly as you said.” I would remind him that I possessed no gift of prophecy. I was simply paying attention. I was observing the direction of things, connecting the dots and projecting where established trends were likely to lead. There were times when he doubted my anxieties. Then events would unfold and he would return, almost bewildered: “But how could you have seen that?” The answer was always the same. You do not need prophecy to anticipate the consequences of repeated choices. Sometimes, you only need to watch carefully enough to recognise a pattern before everyone else is willing to see it.

This week, 58 years ago, set the tone for many of the struggles that have come to define me. The Nigeria-Biafra War stole my innocence. But what they first stole from me, beyond that, was my 18th birthday. Growing up in Ibadan after leaving CKC in Onitsha, I attended Loyola College and became close to many students of the University of Ibadan. In those days, being 18 meant something. If the condition of the nation did not trouble your conscience, something was wrong with your heart. Then Kunle Adepeju was k!lled by a police bullet during a student protest. The protests did not d!e with him. The young people stayed. They demanded justice. Decades later, another generation would stand at Lekki Toll Gate and confront the same brutal question: what happens when those entrusted with protecting citizens turn their we@pons against them? The faces changed. The decades changed. The technology changed. But the struggle remained. And that is perhaps the saddest part of Nigeria's story: how often the dream has been stolen, piece by piece, while generations are left to inherit the broken windows. Yet those students taught us something. A nation's promise may be violated by those in power, but it does not belong to them. It belongs to the people.

The trouble with reflecting on Nigeria these days is that there is too much trouble to ponder. Should you lament with the parents in Borno state whose children have been in captivity for a year and have taken to protests. Surely they must recall those long gone into the belly of terrorists incubation no one but their dearest still remember. Or is it about the person who governs Nigeria being able to do so from where suits him; a paradise Island, Inside a monastery or the very gates of hell, or indeed behind enemy lines if we were at war. Nigeria has been on autopilot for so long sleep walking is the preferred governance mode. For all it’s worth the real Wahala causing palaver may be that character counts, as so many in or seeking public office from presidential to gubernatorial and legislature candidates are being economical with the truth on their certificates.. Ask them in Delta State. Where do we start. Crisis as a way of life is dysfunctional.