I hope that while he is in France convalescing over the next fortnight, President Tinubu appoints a minister of reverse engineering with a mandate to make Nigeria a manufacturing nation

Ayo Akinfe

[1] Like many of you, I have been trying to get my head around Donald Trump's tariff regime. Basically, what he is trying to do is make imports more expensive so that American consumers will be forced to buy cheaper locally manufactured products

[2] I am not sure he has factored in how hard-hit the US will be by retaliatory tariffs however. Does President Trump know that annually, the US exports about $3trn worth of goods, representing about 10% of its gross domestic product?

[3] Countries that sell manufactured goods to the US like Japan, China, Britain, Germany, Malaysia, France, Canada, Mexico, India, etc are all almost certain to retaliate. Eternal consumers and parasitic nations like Nigeria who manufacture nothing and only export primary products have nothing really to fear from Donald Trump's tariffs

[4] You know, in Greek mythology, it was believed that humans were created by the gods as slaves to build their cities and temples but man rebelled, freed himself and decided to do his own thing. It appears that the African was not part of this rebellion and simply lacks that defiant spirit to create and alternative world to the one in which he finds himself. We are content to remain the slaves of the gods

[5] Nowhere else is of docility and lack of initiative more pronounced than in the area of technology. Every serious nation on earth has a department or directorate of reverse engineering that looks at technological developments and seeks to clone them. This is done with automobiles, aircraft, battle tanks, ships, assault rifles, machine tools, trains, etc. No people who want to progress socio-economically sit back and refuse to dismantle and develop technology they currently enjoy

[6] Since the Nigerian Civil War, the Nigerian Army has been using the Soviet T-55 battle tank, while the Nigerian Air Force has been using their Korean war era Mig fighter jets. How come it never occurred to us to reverse engineer these machines and start manufacturing them? During the Cold War, T-55 tanks were deployed to Czechoslovakia and Poland but guess what? They both started manufacturing T-55s. I guarantee you that if we started manufacturing tanks, our order books would be full thanks to demand from across our continent

[7] Nigerians drive around in Toyota and Mercedes SUV jeeps, fly about in Gulfstream private jets, use Honda speedboats in their thousands but yet, it has never occurred to us once to reverse engineer and manufacture these products. If you want to really know how dumb we are, check this out - we are the world’s largest buyer of medium size generators but do not manufacture them in Nigeria. Now this is not a human trait and goes against that spirit of the early Homo Sapiens in Greek mythology who refused to act as slaves for the gods

[8] You know, if extra-terrestrial aliens were to invade earth today, Nigeria, as the world’s largest black nation would have to be one of the countries they visit. I suspect they would actually launch their invasion on earth from Nigeria as we are the least equipped of all the world’s large nations. Basically, we are the soft underbelly of the human race. If we want to be honest and objective, a nation that cannot defend her against a rag tag army of Boko Haram religious fanatics and illiterate Fulani nomads deserves to be conquered by a master specie and converted into slaves to build their economies

[9] It is totally unacceptable for a nation of 200m people not to manufacture their own weaponry, automobiles, aircraft, shopping vessels and battle tanks. By any standards you want to use, we have become a liability to the human race and were it possible, we would be expelled from the club

[10] As a matter of urgency, we need a directorate of reverse engineering that can for instance come up with equipment to multiply cattle and milk production 10-fold to end this Fulani herdsmen saga. We embarrass the human race when our livestock still roam the street like stray urchins. The sad thing is that this our platitude does not shame most Nigerians

ayoakinfe@gmail.com