I expect our next president to use his presence at King Charles’ coronation to organise a mega Anglo-Nigerian summit aimed at attracting payback foreign direct investment 

Ayo Akinfe

[1] In the run-up to The World War Two, Lord Beaverbrook , Britain’s minister of aircraft production had a unique foreign trade polic. He believed Britain should focus all its trade with its colonies like India, Nigeria, Jamaica, etc. He was of the view that trade should be kept within the empire. Sadly, trade with the empire was never really given a try 

[2] Now, do you know that Nigeria is the only country in the world that had three slave shipping ports? We had Calabar, Lagos and Badagry, all if which shipped human cargo to the New World in mega quantities. It is crystal clear that without Nigeria there simply would never have been the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. By my estimation, about one quarter of all the slaves in the New World came from Nigeria. It is no accident that our shores were called Slave Coast and the word Nigger became a generic term for referring to all negroes

[3] Most other countries only had one slave route but we had two. Yoruba slaves captured in the aftermath of the collapse of the Oyo Empire were marched to Badagry and Lagos, while Igbo slaves rounded up by the Arochukwu Confraternity were marched to Calabar

[4] By the 18th century, most ships that transported slaves from Calabar were English, with around 85% of these ships being owned by Bristol and Liverpool merchants. In Badagry, the peak period of the slave trade was between 1736 and 1789. As many as 10,000 slaves were believed to have been shipped to the Americas between 1518 and 1880 from Gberefu Island off the coast of Badagry

[5] By any standards you want to use, the British owe Nigeria several shipyards and I hope our new president makes the case in May when he visits London for the coronation 

[6] Agro-processing is another area in which Nigeria has been a cash cow for Britain. Cadbury’s chocolate factory in Birmingham was founded on the back of Nigerian and Ghanaian cocoa, so they owe us one there big time 

[7] I wonder if Britain’s Industrial Revolution would have been so successful were it not for Nigerian palm oil and groundnuts. I think we are well within our rights to demand “payback foreign direct investment” in both sectors 

[8] We were the world’s largest source of slaves. I believe there is a global consensus that some form of reparation is due to countries like Nigeria 

[9] Also, given the growth of piracy along the African coastline recently, Nigeria should be the continent’s naval policeman with locally manufactured military gunboats patrolling the entire continent. We should be selling vessels to the navies of other African nations too. Britain should be investing in this sector heavily 

[10] Just imagine how we would quadruple the size of the Nigerian economy within five years if we were manufacturing say 10 merchant ships a year at Badagry and Calabar and had say five shipping lines trading across our continent? With a little bit of imagination we can make this nation wealthy overnight.