A civilised society goes for what it produces

One of Nigeria’s thought leaders revealed at a convocation lecture a few years ago that his country spent about $7.4 billion on the importation of toothpicks, fish, milk, textiles, rice and furniture between 2014 and May 2015.
When a nation with wood imports furniture and toothpicks, a nation with oceans, lakes and rivers imports fish, a nation with cows imports milk, a country with most of its land untouched imports food that it can grow and when a nation has an abundance of rainfall at some seasons and yet suffers drought in other seasons, there is a problem. Welcome to Africa.
Where does the journey to civilisation begin? As a child, we studied the resources that Nigeria had in primary school.

We had palm oil and we were the world leaders in its production. We also had tin production and coal production. We were also among the world leaders in cocoa processing and production.

We also had the famous groundnut pyramids and there was food in abundance. The key word in this era of my life was production.

As I grew older, the word production gradually faded into the background of conversations and was replaced by the word potential.

We had slipped from production and now we flaunted our resources and the potential we had as a people based on our resources.

Everyone was now talking about potential. Why this transition? A nation that is doing something about its resources does not have to keep reminding it’s people of its potential. When you are acting on resources, then you will in actual fact live in the potential.

The American dream is a reality and not potential. Many times, conversations that are centred around potential are carried out as encouragement sessions for countries that are doing nothing about the potential. This is the reality and it is a disease is prevalent across the continent.

The largest deposits of cobalt in the world can be found in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

One of the largest deposits of uranium in the world is in Niger. Guinea has at least 25 per cent of the world’s known bauxite reserves. Nigeria has gold, columbite, wolframite, tantalite, bitumen, iron ore and uranium.

There is no single country in Africa without an abundance of some natural resource or the other—absolutely none.

We cannot however take credit for natural resources. We had nothing to do with their existence. We can only take credit for what we do with the natural resources. That is why the word potential in the context of Africa no more makes sense. No one can take potential to the store to buy food.

Where did we drop the ball? We did it when conspicuous consumerism overtook production. Governments that were not producing were creating a mirage of prosperity through consumption driven by unrealistic borrowing. It became elitist to relish things that we did not produce. The value of things replaced the values of the heart.

People no longer regarded values but were more interested in how things looked as against how things were. This shift in value from the inside to the outside was the death of honour and a society without honour is a doomed society.

Civilisation and honour go side by side. A society can be developed without honour but there can be no civilisation without honour.

The cancer of conspicuous consumerism spread across the continent like a plague and the key drivers were the political elite. A by-product of this was that our societies now celebrated malls over factories.