Nigeria cannot do without the North, By Femi Aribisala Without the North, Nigeria and Nigerians would be reduced to nonentities. In 2005, Goldman Sachs Investment Bank forecast that Nigeria will be the 20th largest economy in the world by 2025 and the 12th largest by 2050; ahead of Italy, Canada and South Korea. Having identified Brazil, Russia, India and China as four emergent powerhouses of the world economy referred to as the BRICS; it included Nigeria among “the Next Eleven” countries of Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam. At the U.S.-Nigeria Trade and Investment Forum organised by the Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation of the Americas (NIDOA) in Washington D.C. in 2012, President Barack Obama of the United States acknowledged Nigeria not only as a strategic centre of gravity in Africa; he went further to proclaim the country “the world’s next economic giant.” Early this year, with the rebasing of the country’s GDP, Nigeria emerged as the biggest economy in Africa, surpassing South Africa. Manifest destiny It is no secret that Nigeria is a country of great potentials, even if that potential is yet to be appreciably realised. One of the strengths of the country is its large population. Currently estimated at 170 million, Nigeria is the seventh largest country in the world. By 2050, Nigeria’s population is projected by the United Nations to reach 389 million, rivaling that of the United States at 403 million. By the end of the century, the U.N. projects that Nigeria’s population would be between 900 million and 1 billion, nearing that of China which would then be the second most populous country in the world after India. Nigeria’s economic size is a blessing in disguise. It means the country will have a ready domestic market for its eventual industrial growth. It means it can envisage economies of scale not possible in smaller countries. Even now, Nigeria offers alluring returns for investors. Says Charles Robertson, Global Chief Economist at Renaissance Capital: “We know it’s not risk free, but look around the world and find another economy with 160 million people growing at 7 percent with such potential. It’s a struggle to find them.” Countries go to war to acquire the kind of real estate that is Nigeria. This makes it all the more ludicrous that there are noises coming out of Southern Nigeria demanding that the country should be divided. The most ethnically jingoistic of these is the insistence that Nigeria would be better off without the North. It would appear that some Southern Nigerians have been intoxicated by oil. Since there is no oil in the North, they conclude that the North is no more than an albatross on the neck of the South and castigate it as a region defined by dependency. This view is nothing short of idiotic. No serious-minded country relinquishes a region as rich and as resourceful as Northern Nigeria. Without the North, Nigeria’s much-vaunted potentials would vanish. Without the North, Nigeria would be nothing more than yet another balkanized and insignificant African country, or group of countries. Take the North out of the Nigerian equation and there can no longer be any black country in the world that can possibly attain the status of a major power in the world. Without the North, Nigeria and Nigerians would be reduced to nonentities. Northern imperative Nigerians have been blinded by oil. Because of oil, we have become unproductively mono-cultural in our economy. However, oil is hardly the only major resource we have. Although oil revenues have brought us a great deal of financial prosperity, at the same time it stunted the inexorable emergence of agro-based industries in Nigeria. The backbone of such promissory local industries is in Northern Nigeria. The North is the breadbasket of Nigeria. A significant proportion of the food we eat down South comes from the North. The North occupies 70% of Nigeria’s land mass, giving it comparative advantage vis-à-vis the South in terms of agriculture, raw materials and livestock. A large chunk of the North is arable and supportive of year-round food production. Thanks largely to the North, there is no tropical agricultural crop known to man that cannot be grown in Nigeria. With a transition from subsistence to mechanized agriculture, Northern Nigeria alone can produce enough food to feed the whole of Africa.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 16:17:57 +0000
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