A forward and a response to Gerd Muller 'Nigeria is Not Rich! Far from it'

By
Sampson Iroabuchi Onwuka

I think your MOTION is right - Nigeria is a poor country (both in what is actually obtainable now and in terms of resources), but I encourage better argument in future with just as clear and concise argument.

There is that wholesale dependance on Crude Oil and above all, there is the general lack of DEFINITION on what Nigeria truly is as a people and a culture. The definition await the right President and the right attitude.

Some of founding fathers of the country...Obafemi Awolowo, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, and by default Odumegwu Ojukwu didn't quit believe in the country and all of them made acidic arguments about the no entity which they describe as Nigeria. Many of them have long left the stage but the seeds of failure and of dividion which they planted are growing and may yet be harvested in 'grapes of wrath'.

The puzzle is on the question of poverty in Nigeria and beyond..."To Whom Does The Bell Toll"? in West Africa. It tolls on We the Nigerians and our failures.

But the price of such failure on the fragile union had never been doubted and never greater in these days. But like syndrome, it darkens the very clouds of the younger generation many of them hoping to escape from what some one described an era of 'political failures'.

Yet they stagger or perhaps stumble from their own lack of faith, for we know that our faith in a country driven purely and ultimately by merit could not have possible in Nigeria given the 'malignant cancer of tribalism' from its early.

That cancer is a bi - product of people full of uncertainty, a people who did not know who they are and were they came from. Such cancerous edifies has been made more becoming by the insecurity of poverty from false progress.

Such talk may now seem idle, and it is perhaps idle to count such possibility of change or court it, for it seems clear that our people were not expected by others to have done otherwise as a country.

But nothing in this God given land called Africa and very own Nigeria, has ever being won or accomplished without struggle, nothing was won without endeavour and without a devotion to the higher calling. If these same virtues mentioned above are known through history to have exceded the demands of poverty - it cannot all of a sudden fade or fail for these Nigerians. These were the product of faith.

That faith now compels us to face to the facts of our poverty and irrelevance as a new round of scramble begin for Africa. That faith must therefore be proved among these Nigerians by those who their sons and daughters look up and call fathers and mothers. That country was never that different from the rest of them and their love for their Children were not fake, and not a lie.

That Faith must be kept alive that by our efforts and struggles, that by those virtues which onced consumed the rest of us in Nigeria, would by its undying demand prove that its rewards higher than all the tribes combined. Only then can Nigeria prove its meaning in the world and redeem itself from sinking downwards.

Only then can the 'evidence of things not seen' - the creed of returnee African Slaves and the hope of 18th century Black leaders-whose influence on Ajayi Crowther, Edward Blyden, Johnson, Herbert Macualay, W.E.D Dubois, George Padmore, Paul Robeson, Kwame Nkruma and above all, Nnamdi Azikiwe, for the independent Africa capable of retaining the unbroken chain of endeavor, of the old torching the new, be fulfilled in their dream nation; Nigeria.

Such endeavor should lead us to believe that poeverty can be defeated in West Africa.

That 'evidence of things not seen' which connect the Old to the New - that invisible bond which has held this Nigeria -this West Africa country together so long - CANNOT now untie.