A relaxing thought

I remember learning in chemistry class that a reaction will always spontaneously achieve nirvana -that it will by itself reach equilibrium. This principle is called Le Chateliers Law.

The world is undergoing a radical realignment and even though we can’t really say what the outcome is going to be, we know that it will eventually find some sort of equilibrium that will have to work for the entire world, not just some parts of it. It’s anyone’s guess–the multipliers could be the second industrial revolution or the third world war.

This equilibrium will also mean departing the contemporary Dark Age of humanity–and this was of course derived from the sequence of events so named by Europeans, starting with the collapse of the Roman Empire, because they were in darkness during that particular time period. It is still called the Dark Age even though civilization was flourishing in China and the Arab Muslim empire of the time. But they rule the world, so their history is the default history of the world.

Be that as it may, we are in a neo-Dark Age… that is, we live in a time in which darkness seems to reign supreme over the affairs of the incipient global world order. Our reality is such that societies are divided into fault lines based on ethnicity and other manifestations of natural identity.

The European Dark Ages started with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ended with the Renaissance around the 14th Century. As this equilibrium is negotiated and the road to the looming renaissance is built, the traditional anthropological partitions will give way to a culture of association that is determined by conviction and by material interest instead of the accidents of birth and geography.

The point here is that change will happen, and the future will not wait for anyone. A few days back, a friend was bellyaching about how Nigeria is a sinking ship we should really start considering dumping… because there is no future in Nigeria for anyone who really wants a future. He went on to describe how there are just no opportunities in Nigeria unless you come from a family rich and are connected enough to buy you a job at the CBN or NNPC. Of course, this is not the first time I’ve heard this.

The fact that we export Nigerian jobs and opportunities to the places we escape to when we “escape” is itself a refutation of that dead horse. And the fact we really do think like that is a terrible indictment against our education system, the fact that this is a very popular sentiment among young people in Nigeria is a monument to its failure.

I shared this opinion many a time – that Nigeria seems to have been stuck in the first gear shift, the one initiated by our founding fathers at independence. Once the Brits signaled their intention to disengage, it became a race especially in the north to create a functional civil service from scratch in just a few years. And that means building a corps of civil servants with the most basic clerical skills.

I might be wrong, but our problems as a country are actually quite easy to solve and that is a relaxing thought. We are bogged by a certain kind of cognitive inertia and once we get over that through a sound and visionary leadership, the sky is literally our limit. That’s where our problems begin and perhaps also end. And this problem isn’t that we don’t have sound and visionary leaders but that we don’t understand what leadership is.

Leadership is not a seat in the Senate or being a state governor. Leadership is about solving problems and it is easy to see that the government is not even the place to be if you really want to solve problems. And being in a position to solve a problem means you are in a  position to get rich.

The very fact that we are where we are, the fact that we are quite literally the wretched of the earth means that this corner of the world is a goldmine full of opportunities. The whole point of an education is to be the instrumentation for problem-solving; and not only that, education is also supposed to give you the skills to sniff out the opportunities of solving those problems while creating value and wealth for oneself or the whole country.

For instance, our problems include the issues of electricity, highways, rail, manufacturing, schools, hospitals… and it is either the government solves these problems for us otherwise they don’t get solved at all. The simple fact that we have these problems means that we are swimming neck-deep in opportunities.

The type of opportunities you will of course not find in the places we run to for greener pastures. If we have a problem with security, that is an opportunity. The wet season in northern Nigeria is about only four months and that limits the cultivation window. That is an opportunity. All it takes is intellectual resourcefulness and you end up solving the problem and also creating wealth. Petrol subsidy is gone and that has caused a lot of problems. That too is an opportunity.

As this global change takes place, no one is in a better position to take the world by storm, to lead the way for mankind and to create great riches than a young Nigerian.  And that is a relaxing thought.