By Sunday Adelaja
TODAY I choose to celebrate Nigeria. I’m tired and fed up of all the evil reports. While I don’t deny all the issues and failures of our nation and in particular of our leaders, I want to intentionally move away from all the stories of woes and point my country men to the other side of the coin. There is always another side to any story as with any coin. So , n Nigeria’s story there is also the other side that we hardly hear about. (In this article I’m using 60 years as an approximate age for Nigeria). BuyMaps
1. Ever heard that Nigeria can’t produce anything even ordinary pencil? Stop speaking down on your country. Nigeria produces; automobiles, trucks, cars, copters, military wares, ships, pharmaceutical goods, agricultural machinery, etc. How many countries have done this after only 60 years of independence?
2. At independence we had only one university, the University of Ibadan. Today, we have 170 Universities, 105 Polytechnics and about 100 Colleges Of Education. Compare that with what’s obtainable in other countries with similar fundamentals.
3. At independence our colonial masters only left us with 200 qualified medical doctors in the whole country. Today Unilag alone produces 250 doctors per annum. Nation wide Nigeria produces 12.000 doctors annually. ANPA – Association of Nigerian Physicians in Northern America, New York branch has 5000 Nigerian Doctors and Medical Professionals. 2nd highest ethnic group of Physicians in the United States and UK after India. Would you say that’s of no essence intellectual development, bearing in mind where we are coming from. Yes, they move abroad for greener pastures but this too shall pass, it’s a stage most countries pass through in their history.
4. 30 yrs ago, Lekki Peninsula was a mangrove. Including Ibeju Lekki that now houses the Dangote refinery which is said to be the largest single-train refinery in the whole world. Today, that whole axis ranks among the fastest developing estates in the world.
5. When the British colonisers left our shores there was not a single Nigerian Pilot 60 yrs ago. We are still not where we need to be, but Nigeria doesn’t need to import all her pilots as was the case a few decades ago. Today, we have female Nigerian Pilots flying planes with international airlines.
6. In sports we were not represented before independence. Now, Tobi Amusan and others before her have put us on the world map in athletics. In soccer our feats especially in junior football is unmatched and unparalleled in the history of the sport. The first African Nation to participate and win a Junior world Cup. We’ve won it 5 times, becoming runners up 3 times, the only country to come close to us is Brazil with 4 titles and 2 runners-up. We have even won 27 Olympics medals, Gold medals in Football, Sprint and High Jump.
7. Too many people glorify our past as if we were doing better than now. In reality it’s not anything close to the truth. All the so called cotton, groundnut pyramids, cocoa, timber etc gave us only about 4 billion USD GDP as at 1960, today it’s over 500 billion.
9. Within 60 years of corporate existence, we’ve produced a Nobel Prize Winner, A Pulitzer Award Winner, and other professional leaders of global repute.
10. Nigeria now has 5 satellites in space. In 60 years we now do Renal Surgery, IVR, organ transplant, and some good scientific breakthroughs. Could we have done better, yes of course and we should do better. But the point of this write up is that we often don’t even acknowledge what we have. To go higher we must take inventory of who we are and where we are. If we don’t know what we have we can’t be able to improve on it.
11. At the time of independence more Nigerians were dying than alive. Poor hygiene has now reduced to the extent that polio and cholera had been eradicated
