By Dr. Hephizibah Suobo
Why should any African be infuriated when good investment come to Africa , these artificial boundaries called states where not in existence before the 1883 Berling Conference: anglo-german balkanization of Africa. Africans existed in city-states who traded as neighbors .
There still exist pre-colonial trade routes for accessing each other’s markets without tariff, custom duties, or passports etc.
Hithero , in modern Africa, you hear the statement “if you invest in Africa , the money stays in Africa”. This drives pan africanism in terms of trade liberalization to the point that the African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) is just a political cealing board for free trade among 55 states.
The entire Africa is now one trade block and the largest trade block in the world . Ghana lobbied the AU to host AFCTA Secretariat in Accra . The African American Museum in Washington DC has Ghanaian cultural outfit. Pres. Barack Obama in his Presidential African tour chose Ghana over NIgeria.
Ghana succeeded in making herself a fair advantage over NIgeria- it’s populous neighbor with no direction.
I pledge to NIgeria my country – is the first integration of national values and the first love of citizenship. We can’t recount how many times it was reiterated repeatedly recurrently and concurrently in our lips through primary and secondary schools. If these words were potent , every NIgerian should be held accountable for failure or success of this Nation.
Twitter’s choice of Ghana is entirely a corporate responsibility. And Ghana created the enabling environment.
Ghana is not a subnational state in NIgeria.Ghana is an African sovereign state with over 32 million people. My last trip to Accra in 2018, I held my shoulders high as if I was in an European country.
NIgeria had gotten to the stage of redefinition. The federating units had been at logger heads with the center over resource allocation, boundary adjustment and restructuring.
The center is now a tribalistic umbrela that shelters only one ethic group parading and mascurading only insidious political breed whom Wole Soyinka refered to as ” the Old doderers’ in his satire “the Jero Plays”. Sadly, only one ethnic stock holds the center and parades NIgeria’s debilitating political connodrum, and our democracic ethos has become an existential threat to our own National livelihood.
NIgeria is experiencing Internalized neo colonialism. A Psudo democracy that anchors on hegemonic, nepotistic and anachronistic and bigoted Leadership that sees nothing good in fellow NIgerians ( tribes and ethnic groups ) except for exploitation.
Even the advent of 1999 democracy had failed to induce national reintegration and build a pan NIgerian state and egalitarian society.
We are more divided amongt our selves within the context of a heterogeneous complex state. A tower of babel with many confusing tongues per kilometer.
Neither the use of anglicized literacy , creole or pidgin have failed to ring the bells of unity in diversity. While we struggle in the redefining of our nationhood , the new crop of leaders are fuelling ethnic cleansing, political hegemony and land grab ideology aimed at sacking ethnic nationaliites.
Instead of being a nation of elites, innovators , inventor s and investors , we have become a nation of forest maruders , bigots and ethnic gingoists , political jobbers , economic rocket scientists steeped in fiscal and financial mismanagement , we have become a reservoir of electoral fraudsters and pidgin language enthusiasts building a false narrative of giant of Africa.
While these anomalies paraded our democratic stint , a smaller entity called Ghana was picking on our greatest digital advantage.
Twitter with 32 million active NIgerian users courted the former Gold Coast as it’s bride. While NIgerians only flirted with Twitter and later realized Ghana was the real economic bride. NIgeria twitters users were dumped .
Ghana was more shrewd in business to take the market away from the errings in NIgeria state based on their national merits and ease of doing business.
Who else should be coming for NIgeria upcoming advantages
Next maybe Cameoun , Niger , Chad or Bene Republic etc .
They are watching for the next wind fall , NIgerians beware- very soon NIgerians will be running to the neighboring states for jobs and be treated as second class citizens.
The only place I can be a first class citizen in the world is Nigeria. Congratulations to Ghana and Ghanaians. If the bible analogy drawn from Ezekiel 37 says “Dry bones shall rise again*, then I say this in positive affirmation that Nigeria will rise again.
