If there is anything you should never be, it is being “an average Nigerian.” They know everything yet know nothing. They discuss what they don’t know like they earned doctorates studying its ignorance. They can rationalize any idiocy and make the declaration of same sound like words from the Holy Scriptures. The average Nigerian starts an argument and ends it without learning any new thing. On social media, the average Nigerian could be a viral disaster. A lot of nonsense has been going on about Lagos and the relocation of certain persons of Anambra origin. But the daftest of the lot has to be the claim by yet another average Nigerian that Lagos was developed by Niger Delta’s oil. It is the most stupid thing ever said even by an “average Nigerian.”
I respect people from all places but no matter how hard I try I’d never get over my contempt for people who think their village or origin is the centre of the world. That before their people came to the world the world never existed and the world would cease to exist if their people deemed it surplus to necessity. I do not agree with Chief Femi Fani-Kayode that the Yoruba people alone developed Lagos. That does not fit into my understanding of the fact that a city cannot attain development without outside influence. The British for instance should get some credit for the development of Lagos. They will of course not get the whole credit because Lagos existed before them too. There was no Niger Delta oil in 1861 but there was Lagos long before it became a British Colony. Lagos was one of the biggest trade hubs on the continent and it has always been a melting pot of cultures and civilizations. Lagos has a political history that dates back into some five centuries.
It is like saying Niger Delta’s oil developed Kano. This is what an average Nigerian would say. Before there were rigs in Rivers, there were pyramids in Kano. Before the oil pipelines, there were irrigation lines in the farms and dams across Nigeria. Agro-allied industries thrived. When oil came, the money from agriculture was its seed investment. Nigeria had a budget before the oil boom, we had a national income and it was not dropping from heaven like the manna of the Israelites. People who cannot see beyond what they can see today are trapped in the darkness of time. They live in a trapped existence, a reality that fits them into one dimension, only existing in the present. They have no sense of yesterday and no imagination of tomorrow. As far as an average Nigerian goes “as it is right now, is what it was yesterday and so will it be when tomorrow comes.” Such pitiful primordial mentality.
Those who do not know should ask questions. That Lagos today generates record tax numbers is not something that just happened, it was borne out of necessity. Then President Olusegun Obasanjo denied Lagos its allocations because of his personal issues with then Lagos Governor, Bola Tinubu. This necessitated a need for Lagos to swim or sink. Lagos thrived. Governor Tinubu looked within and Lagos discovered it could do without the stipends from the Nigerian centre. Many have distorted the history of the Tinubu Lagos years but none can deny he made sure Lagos was running when many states would have declared bankruptcy under the same circumstance.
If Nigeria’s oil dries up today as it certainly would someday, Lagos would be just fine. It was fine before the oil came, it was fine after the oil came and it was fine when President Obasanjo held its share of its mostly oil dependent allocation. If you need a prophet to tell you Lagos is on a city-state path to development and self sufficiency, then that darkness earlier mentioned is even thicker for you than for the other average Nigerians.
We need to get this right into our skulls: the world will not end because some people die; civilizations that existed before certain realities will exist after those realities are gone. I don’t know if the average Nigerian has the ability to upgrade into a multidimensional thinker. For those that can, it is time for us to come to terms with this reality; Nigeria will survive without a part of its whole and Nigeria is a product of the sum of its part. All of us are responsible for the prosperity that we see in Nigeria and the poverty that abounds. The next time I hear someone say “Lagos was developed by the oil from the Niger Delta,” I’d be made to wonder how the darkness in some lives would see the light if their sole understanding of light is PHCN.
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