I for one remain fearful of the fact that if these World War Two 80th anniversary celebrations do not spur Africa into action, nothing else will

Ayo Akinfe

[1] In this picture are boats built out of concrete during World War One. They were built in Canada and the US Navy bought 24 of them in 1918 because they needed ships but because there was a shortage of steel, concrete was used instead. These boats worked perfectly well and were re-introduced during World War Two. They performed a massive role during the D-Day Normandy landings. Has anyone in the Niger Delta ever come up with the idea of manufacturing concrete ships to radically change the economy of the area

[2] Whenever I agonise over how under-developed Nigeria is and how developed it should be, I always ask myself whether we as a people are not responsible for our own plight. There is a popular school of thought that the masses are fine but the problem is just bad leadership. However, does this theory stand up to scrutiny?

[3] When I look at the history of Europe and North America, what I find is that nations like Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, USA, Canada, etc, tended to have developed organically. It was only really in the 20th century that we saw dynamic and radical leadership used to speed up the process of national development

[4] Very few industrialised countries were developed by the kind of dynamic leadership we are demanding in Nigeria today. If we look back historically, this idea of radical leadership forcing the pace of development only began in 1917 when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and introduced an unprecedented industrialisation programme to convert the country from a rural and peasant backwater into an industrial and military global super power. It led to a 28% year-on-year growth in GDP for about a decade

[5] This concept of leadership forcing the pace of development was later adopted by the madman Adolf Hitler, who made Germany the world’s most industrialised nation by 1940, with unprecedented innovations. He just kept building Panzer tanks that got quicker and were stronger by the day. Everything he built was bigger, faster, stronger, quicker, talker, wider, etc than what had previously existed

[6] If we want to be honest with ourselves, the principle of dynamic leadership developing a nation is actually very Asiatic. After World War Two, we saw nations like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and now China and Vietnam fast-track their development with unprecedented speed thanks to the actions of their governments. Today, India, Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, etc have all entered the fray

[7] Now, if you look across the African continent, it is only really in Rwanda and Ethiopia that you are seeing governments leading from the front. Elsewhere, development is more evolutionary, with nations by and large developing at the rate of the citizenry

[8] Our unique problem in Nigeria is that our citizenry demands that the country develops at a faster rate than natural evolution. We have a populace of about 200m and a population growth rate of about 3%. Our economy is projected to grow by about 2% anuslly, meaning we already have a shortfall. By my calculations, the citizen-led evolutionary growth of the economy stands at no more than 1%, yet we want 10% GDP growth rates to meet our challenges. This is why we are so desperate for a messiah to take us to the Promised Land

[9] Our problem is we want Asian Tiger levels of economic growth but want it provided “from above” by a messiah. As a result, we will always be disappointed with our leaders because they are genuine mirror reflections of who we are as a people. Our leaders are a mirror image is the average Nigerian

[10] Nigerians need to ask themselves what they really want. Are they prepared to elect a radical leader to introduce aggressive and unpopular measures that will deliver double digit economic growth including converting churches and mosques into libraries, taxing owambes, etc or do they just want to bubble along organically?

ayoakinfe@gmail.com