Angered by what I thought of as distractions of quarrelling over the vice-chancellor position at UNIZIK just after a video of an Indian official projecting where India was going, I basically vented on the Nigerian elite fiddling with distractions of petty pursuits a few days ago. I was surprised when someone asked this evening if he had my permission to share the event. Why not? Then I decided I should join in his desire. It follows:
It’s a little more than whether our government is listening or not. For someone like me who has followed India closely for more than 30 years, it leaves a deep gash with pain from my bleeding soul when I think of Nigeria.
“Today, his global South agenda, beyond vaccine diplomacy, is looking to shape the future of our planet.”
In 1994, I began teaching a class at LBS with a title from a case study just written then in 1993 by Jonathan Storey at INSEAD: India—Hindu elephant or Asian tiger.
Then Indian High Commissioner in Nigeria Lalit Mansingh, who was Dean of the Diplomatic Corps and would invite me as a special guest to New Delhi when he became Foreign Secretary 6 years later before finishing as Ambassador to the UN, would ask people to his VI residence in Lagos and request of who he used to call ‘the guru’ to speak. I would get up in embarrassment, mildly protesting, with the World Bank Resident Mission Chief Gerald Flood saying if an Indian upper crust calls you guru, that is who you are.
India had just come out of technical bankruptcy with barely three weeks of trading money in its reserves. PM R Rao and future PM Manmohan Singh, who he appointed finance minister, had just begun a reform process that I saw then as promising.
Today, the big consulting firms are projecting that by the end of the next decade, China should be the planet’s preeminent economy, with India as number 2 and the United States as no. 3, even as the guru’s country Nigeria combines with DRC to produce 60 percent of the poorest and most miserable people, as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation study projected, shortly after the Brookings study that named us the poverty capital of the world.
Yet, we had it in our grasp to be the first Black power as Newsweek projected in 1970.
Today you cannot even have a conversation on how to move forward because soldiers of fortune in uniform and mufti have reduced everything to propaganda, name-calling, finger-pointing, and partisan and ethnic jingoism.
This is why sleep mocks me today, and I am angry, very angry, at an elite so shameless as to be consumed by who controls power for state capture and who is VC or governor. If this be a curse, may God forgive us.
When Modi was first campaigning to be PM, I was in India spending a week at the Art of Living Foundation Ashram in Bangalore as part of my annual unwinding plan. Modi stopped by at the Ashram to see the real guru, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
I could feel it in my spirit that night he would be the transformation of India. I quickly went and bought his biography. Today, his global South agenda, beyond vaccine diplomacy, is looking to shape the future of our planet.
I cry for my beloved country, especially because those who crippled her still walk with a swag urged on by dangerous stupid idiots, if you consider the scientific meaning of stupid idiots.
My pain deepened when last month James Robinson was interviewed on CNN shortly after the co-author of Why Nations Fail? and two of his colleagues were named winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics, and he said what it takes to develop is well known these days, but some do not seem to know how to do it like Nigeria. Ten years before the Robinson and Acemoglu book, my own book of a similar title, Why Nations Are Poor, appeared on the same premise of institutions and economic performance.
It’s hard to sleep when these are the things that confront you!
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