Over the years, our consumption rate has tremendously increased yet our capacity to be self-reliant has dwindled. It wouldn’t be over-flogging the issue to say Nigeria is endowed with adequate amount of natural resources to make us more than comfortable.
The discovery of oil led us to abandon all our produce, and that marked the road to our retrogression.
Malaysia, that was at par with Nigeria, in palm oil production, is now one of the major producers in the world. Indonesia, which used to be in the same class with Nigeria with regards to performance and policy during and shortly after the oil boom has progressed to another class.
The question that many have asked repeatedly is: “What went wrong?” The first television station in tropical Africa was built with the cocoa proceeds in the western part of the country. What happened to the groundnut pyramids in the north? What happened to the palm oil fields in the East and the rubber plantation in the Middle Belt? Most of the institutions we inherited have collapsed.
Olusanya Anjorin writes from Lagos