It has been extremely tough knowing that I am living in this generation where nothing (catalytic) seems to work in Nigeria. The last few days have been unbelievably shameful: killing of priests, kidnapping of soldiers, sacking police station, jumping senator from a moving car, killing of farmers (again, again and again), and add your list.
In my business, I receive reports weekly from teams. Last week, one began with “Sir, our risks are no more just markets but sovereign-infested quagmire where our strategic imperatives are uncorrelated with elements of any efficient economic systems. We have asked men to stop work in […] to make sure that girls and boys will have their dads tomorrow”.
Many of us pray. Please pray for Nigeria. This is no more about APC and PDP– this is Nigeria.
What can be done to help our leadership to fix these issues? Keep politics out of this: what can Nigeria do now? My concern is that if we do not fix the root causes, they grow out of control because our capacities to provide solutions are linear [arithmetic progression] while the stimulating root causes are geometric [geometric progression]. Simply, any problem not solved today multiplies faster than our ability to get the problem under control in future. I see massive hopelessness anchored on unprecedented unemployment as the main root cause: that is the gray lizard.
We have a big problem in Nigeria right now. Unemployment is destroying the promises of a generation of young people. With extremely limited decent labor entry points, our young people would lag their peers in career developments within years.
In America, they talk of black swans: ” high-impact risks that are highly improbable and therefore almost impossible to predict”. Yes, “an unpredictable or unforeseen event, typically one with extreme consequences.” That is it: “something extremely rare”. So, because it is rare, you do not (usually) plan for it. Arab Spring was a black swan as the leaders of North Africa could not have modeled that risk.
In Nigeria, we do not just have black swan. We have gray lizard. It is a high impact risk, that is highly probable and evidently visible but totally, widely and irresponsibly ignored. The massive youth unemployment in Nigeria is a gray lizard. Governments see it daily but it is totally ignored.
We need to CREATE jobs in Nigeria. It may be time to bring $1 billion home [from the foreign reserves] purely to stimulate job creation through SME growth, and possibly see if the companies can help provide jobs in the nation. I have proposed how these jobs can be created in Nigeria . The greatest weapon in our nation is the economy. Yes, while we spend $1 billion on weapons [guns, grenades, etc], there is also a need to invest in the growth areas so that we can use jobs as weapons against insecurity. If we can have average of 3,000 jobs per ward within a year, things will improve across Nigerian communities.
