Nigeria: Country that didn’t see the future

“The secret is to see the future before it arrives”

– Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

Today was the future 20 years ago. It was also the future, a distant future, some 50 or 60 years ago. Now, that future has come upon us and Nigeria is tottering because we never saw it coming in this fashion.

Whatever is happening to Nigeria today as a nation is a consequence of its inability to see the future before it arrived. If Nigeria were a human being, now lying sick on a hospital bed, a description of the patient, would probably be “The man who failed to see the future”.

As Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad have said in their book, ‘Competing for the Future’, “The trick is to see the future before it arrives”. The tragedy of our nation is that we were so consumed by the goodies of yesterday in the form of short-term benefits that we never cared much about the future, let alone envisioning what, for instance, the year 2023 could mean for the country.

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Nigeria is tottering on every side. The economy is wobbling; health is nonexistent; agriculture,  manufacturing, technology and infrastructure are standing on thin legs. Even oil and gas that we claim leadership in has not brought broad-based gains.

Nigeria today is like a giant suddenly woken from a deep, long sleep and in that state has lost his sense of where he is and where he should be headed.

Everything is wrong with us as a nation. We have an abundance of all resources but countries without a quarter of what we have in each area are doing far better than we are. So, the difference is certainly not in the having. We have oil and gas, but what positive difference has this brought to the average Nigerian?

While oil lasted as the revenue earner of the nation, what good did it do for the majority of the people? Certainly, if the petrodollars that flowed into Nigeria in the heydays of the nation’s oil glory had benefited the masses through investments that touch lives, we would not be the poster image of poverty that we are today.

At the start of last first decade of this century, when I covered the Nigerian oil and gas industry, we wielded so much power in the international energy market. If the Nigerian oil sector sneezed, as they say, the world economies shivered.

As the fifth-biggest supplier of crude oil to the United States then, we dictated the price of oil. If PENGASSAN and NUPENG threatened to shut down oil flow stations, these countries quaked and oil prices jumped. Brokers on the floors of mercantile exchanges bellowed “Buy”, “Buy” “Buy” orders, as the market responded to a move by Nigeria’s oil workers to shut crude production.

As the traders yelled out orders, prices for oil delivery in six months, and nine months down the road jumped as the market feared that global supplies would be disrupted by developments in Nigeria.

Now, things have changed. I do not remember when the last threats of oil supply disruption from Nigeria led to such frenzied activities on any exchange. We have certainly lost that market power.

Perhaps, relying on such a natural advantage, the leadership of the country over these years paid little or no attention to the dynamics in the global oil industry. The political leadership and the industrial leaders in particular failed to see the trend in the industry and where its future lay.

At home, we relapsed into docility. Under the watchful eyes of our regulators, NNPC and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the nation’s four refineries began a journey of decline, and today it is not quite clear exactly what their state of health is. Whatever they have become, they certainly have failed to play the role of refining crude oil to supply to the local market and export also, as part of the talk about diversification of the country’s export base.

We have abundant labour, but do we care about them? We maltreat them, ill-equip them, and denigrate them, and when they want to leave your country for you some people in power now want to restrain them from travelling!

In this globalised world where factors of production roam the earth freely, some powerful people want to put roadblocks in the way of labour. We as a nation have become a case study in virtually everything that is wrong or the wrong way to do things in the modern world in which we live.

Meanwhile, the world refused to wait for us. As we paid lip service to the cry for infrastructure, the international community moved on, as it embraced technology and innovation.

In the same oil industry where we were claiming a dominant position, consumers in the advanced nations were reacting to the power of the producers. They began to search for alternatives to both oil and gas.

Consumers of oil and gas could no longer continue to allow themselves to be dictated to by a few producers of such an important product. In addition to the monetary costs, they were also bearing additional costs in the form of environmental degradation, which also became a major policy consideration.

These two factors inevitably led to the search for alternatives to oil, and to some extent, gas. Our leaders failed to see these coming, as they basked in the euphoria of being market leaders and the leading oil producer in Africa.

Such natural advantages no longer last. They are now easily overshadowed by the powers conferred on nations by technological advantages.

Seeing the future is not a spiritual exercise here. It is simply a contemplation of various variables that impinge on the social, economic, and even political sustainability of the country, and being able to come out with different scenarios of what they could produce, acting today to create various possibilities.

It is, by way of paraphrasing the theory of the lost horse, putting the country in the position of the current consumers of Nigeria’s products and asking, “What products would you want to buy in 20, 30, or 50 years’ time,” and going ahead to design and produce according to the answers we get.

Our failure to do this has inevitably led to the situation where Nigeria finds itself today. In 20 years from now, can Nigerians look back and say that they saw that future before it arrived?