A relaxing thought

I remember learning in chemistry class that a chemical reaction will always find equilibrium, usually at the cost of something else. Equilibrium, or maybe nirvana, is the certain outcome of any notion that is at all conceivable by the human consciousness. This principle is called Le Chateliers Law.

The radical geopolitical realignment may or may not culminate in WWIII. Here is a prayer, fervent and solemn, that it will not come to that. But nature will have its equilibrium, with or without humanity. If we are determined to go with this tide and survive it, both sides will have to bend over backwards to accommodate the other side, but we know that is not going to happen even though the only two options answering this equation are defined by life and death. It’s anyone’s guess what this prospect means, and the multipliers could be as far-fetched as the Second Industrial Revolution or a nuclear holocaust.

This equilibrium will also mean departing the contemporary Dark Age of humanity. The European Dark Age derives from the sequence of events precipitated by the collapse of the Roman Empire, so named because Europe was enveloped in darkness during that particular time period. With the rise of the multipolar world, which means the collapse of the Western hegemony over the affairs of mankind as it were, another pan-human Dark Age might ensue in the aftermath of a catastrophic nuclear exchange between the side bent on preserving the status quo and the incipient Global South. The European Dark Age is formally applied to all parts of “that” world, even though civilization was flourishing in China and the Arab Muslim empires of the time. But Europe rules the world today and, since Europe wrote contemporary history, European history is the default history of the world.

Maybe we are already in this neo-Dark Age… that is, we live in a time in which darkness seems to reign supreme over the affairs of the collapsing global world order. Our reality is such that societies are divided into fault lines based on politics and other manifestations of human identity.

• Tinubu will transmit whistleblowing policy to National Assembly soon –Edun
• NAHCON Needs systemic reform – Presidency

The European Dark Ages started with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ended with the Renaissance around the 14th Century. As the equilibrium that followed was being negotiated by nature, and the road to a prospective pan-human renaissance is built, the traditional anthropological fissures 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 and we should really start considering jumping. Or 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 that is rich, and are connected enough to buy you employment at the CBN or NNPC. Of course, we all know this dance.

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. The outlook for the rest of the world is much direr than ours. The problem is that we are bogged by a certain kind of cognitive inertia and once we get over that through sound and visionary leadership, the sky is literally our limit. If we put half as much effort we waste in agonising instead of organising, we will already have achieved break-out. 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 right of occupancy at one of the 36 government houses in the country. 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 of opportunities. The whole point of an education is to be an instrumentation for problem-solving; and not only that, an education is supposed to stimulate both the imagination and agency to sniff out the opportunities… the end is the inherent deliverables that come with solving problems while creating value and wealth for oneself and the society he belongs.

Yes, this world will change. And to us, as Africans, as a people agitated by facts of history and sociology, there could not have been a better time to be alive.

It is also true that our problems include deficiencies in electricity, highways, rail, manufacturing, schools and hospitals. The way we think, it is either the government solves these problems for us, otherwise they don’t get solved at all; and when they don’t get solved at all, our big solution is to simply fly away.

The mere 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 intellect, and resourcefulness and you end up solving the problem, 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.