Nigeria is fast becoming the soft underbelly of the human race 

By Ayo Akinfe 

(1) It has been 18 days into the new government and we are still waiting for President Buhari to name his new ministers. It looks like somethings have simply refused to change. If we were a serious nation really keen on lifting 100m people out of poverty as we have been hearing of late, the government would have hit the ground running with a plethora of job-creating initiatives over the last fortnight 

(2)Over the last 48 hours, we have been hearing that the science and technology minister Ogbonnaya Onu will be made the secretary to the federal government. I say fine, let him take the job as the science and technology portfolio needs a fresh pair of hands that can take Nigeria by the scruff of the neck and turn her into one huge manufacturing plant. Together with the ministers of trade & industry and agriculture, this person must be prepared to work 18 hours a day every day for the next four years 

(3) 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. No wonder religion has taken such deep root in our society 

(4) 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 

(5) 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 Mig fighter jets. How come it never occurred to us to reverse engineer these machines and start manufacturing them? During the Cold War, these tanks were deployed to Czechoslovakian and Poland but guess what? They both started manufacturing T-55s. Today, faced with the Boko Haram threat, we are going to the Czech Republic to by T-72 for millions of dollars. Now, the T-72 is an upgrade on the T-55, which sells for about $500,000 on European black market. Surely, it would have been 10 times more cost effective to manufacture our own tanks. Just imagine how much revenue we would generate if we manufactured tanks for all of Africa’s armies. I guarantee you that if we started making them, our order books would be full thanks to demand from across our continent 

(6) 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

(7) With the growth of software and as computer-aided design (CAD) has become more popular, reverse engineering has become a viable method to create a 3D virtual model of an existing physical part of a machine. In lay man’s terms, this means that the reverse-engineering process involves measuring an object and then reconstructing it as a 3D model. This is not rocket science and and any engineering university undergraduate should be able to reverse engineer say a Nissan Qashqai or a Toyota Rav 4. Our intellectual laziness is so frightening at times, it scares me 

(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 from Nigeria as we are the least equipped or prepared 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. As a matter of urgency, President Buhari needs to set up a directorate of reverse engineering immediately and give it strict deadlines when it is to start producing goods like automobiles, battle tanks, assault rifles, cargo ships, etc 

(10) Our directorate of reverse engineering should for instance come up with equipment to multiply cattle and milk production 10-fold to end this Fulani herdsmen saga. It should open dedicated ranches where we will build huge animal feed compounding plants, milk factories and meat processing facilities. We embarrass the human race when in 2019 our livestock still roam the street like stray urchins. The sad thing is that this our platitude does not shame most Nigerians. This then begs the question - Do we have the same origin as the rest of the human race?