Yes. I said it. What?
Africa is largely doomed. Nigeria is absolutely doomed. Now what are we going to do about it?
Alright. In the fantasy world where I somehow end up in charge of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, I would do ... well, actual me isn't ruthless enough to do what logic tells me would need to be done in order to achieve practical viable progress in a single lifetime.
So let's try this again. Let's pretend I am that guy. First things first would be have every corrupt political figure executed quickly and messily -- and PUBLICLY. You know who they are. Those that survive would be forced to flee the country and banned from ever coming back. This will put the whole country on notice. If this sounds like a dictatorial solution ... then you should have thought of that before putting the likes of my more-ruthless hypothetical self in charge of Nigeria, a country where one of our airlines had a door fall off the plane as it landed and it's really only a big deal on Twitter.
All the funds they looted would have to be recovered of course. They'll be needed for the next phase.
I would call in the Israelis to train up our military (borrowing a leaf from Lee Kuan Yew's playbook - man was a genius of realpolitik) Simultaneously, I would have the military retrain the police by whatever means necessary because their corrupt nonsense must be stopped with immediate effect. The Nigerian police would need to recruit massively, be upgraded with the right gear, paid far better than before and most of all equipped with the right mindset, one where extorting naira from innocent motorists (or accepting it from guilty ones) would be far beneath their dignity. This would be accomplished by both negative and positive reinforcement, the positive being that cops would start getting paid a lot more and equipped a lot better to encourage them to actually do their jobs and to consider it worth doing.
The negative being messy public executions.
Why all this? Because without the ability to genuinely enforce the law for people at every socioeconomic stratum, we will not be able to move forward with any other project without corruption and nepotism dragging behind us like an anchor on land. The new people in government will be aware of what's at stake and operate accordingly, acting in the country's best interests because it is in their best interests to do so. Because their lives literally depend on it.
After that is done, now we can start on positive changes in the country without being held back by drags on progress.
TOURISM
First actual positive change, we have to keep the momentum going. With well-equipped high-morale law enforcement and military that have both been trained up to international standards, we can now make a serious move on Boko Haram, the Fulani Herdsmen and any other violent idiots that are disgracing Nigeria at home and abroad.
With safety, comes the possibility of tourism. Nigeria has a great many beautiful waterfalls, rock formations and all manner of cool stuff to look at. The kind of thing that Kenya would have made so much national cake off, our idiot existing leaders have allowed to lie fallow and be completely ignored. I will not make that mistake. If Nigeria is safe for foreigners to visit, they will have cool places to take iPhone X pictures in 👺👺👺
Moreover, those tourists, they'll need locals to sell stuff to them, to be tour guides, to be guides to the stuff you don't find on tours. That's jobs. Tourism dollars buy us a lot. That leads to the next point.
PORTS
Nigeria for now lives and dies by imports. As a visionary Nigerian leader, believe you me, I fully intend to address that -- but for now, I have to work with what I can improve at high speed. Nigeria needs to lose the bottleneck of Lagos being the only real international economic hub and the best way to do that is to open the doors for other states to do business. Start building ports everywhere that Nigeria touches water, bring in investors to help, GoFundMe at the geopolitical scale, no IMF or World Bank loans (now I'm dipping into the Thomsas Sankara playbook) and it has the lovely side-effect of encouraging local manufacturers to ramp up their game.
But building ports takes too long. In the interim, heavy-lift helicopters and cargo planes and jumbo drones (like the ones the Chinese are testing right now for passengers. Scale that up for high-value cargo and we've got something interesting -- and our skies will become as unto those of Wakanda.
ADDRESSING
Believe it or not, the lack of a consistent street addressing system in Nigeria is a massive problem. It drastically slows down commerce, censuses and numerous other functions. More interestingly however, it's a problem that today's open-source GPS Big Data world can cheaply and quickly solve. I'd simply invite one of the companies already doing digital street addressing and make them throw a grid across the country that lets even the most remote villages have addresses. Hello, voter registration; hello, e-commerce delivery; hello, document delivery; hello, accessibility; hello, hello, hello in general.
ELECTRICITY
One word: Solar.
Okay, more than one word: Massive Investment in Solar because no time no time. Get this show on the road, subsidize it massively for everyone who wants it from schools to barbershops, hospitals to huts and let the chips fall where they may. Whatever spirit is blocking us from solar when we have more than over-abundant sunlight in our boiling hot country, that spirit should PERISH BY FIRE! PERISH BY FIRE!!!! PERISH BY FIRE!!!!!
EDUCATION
Nigeria's education sector is ... okay. Did you ever hear the story about the guy who wanted to paint the side of his house but, instead of just painting the house, dug a massive hole 30 feet deep in front of his house, went down in the hole with a ladder, climbed the ladder and then painted his house? No?
Yeah, that's exactly what Nigeria's higher education system is like.
How do we fix it? Well, once upon a time, our colonizers the British when their country was young were famed for the prowess of their longbow archers. There came a day when the British king of the time met with the king of another nation. The other king, perhaps frustrated, asked the British king: "How do you train such incredible archers?" And the British king answered: "If you wish to train a English longbowman, you must start with his grandfather."
On the one hand, that's the kind of strategic forward thinking we need to improve Nigeria. With that in mind, I would say forget the universities and start lower down at the primary schools. Write off our existing crop of university students and just start over at the roots.
So instead I would sponsor and promote a show on the scale of Big Brother Naija -- except that instead of having a bunch of sex addled semi-illiterate celebrity wannabes in a house, I'd have a casting call for people like this guy, kids with that natural talent for tech and I'd throw them into a great big lab/junkyard and have them compete (and yes, fuck and fight too, sure whatever.)
Get kids excited about science and tech and building cool stuff with our own hands in our own country. Excited about things that aren't money (well, not just money), aren't religion and aren't fleeing to better countries where things actually work. Winner gets 45 million naira, all the computers and tablets he or she can handle and an all-expenses paid admission to any university in the world they can get into, be it MIT or Caltech or something Chinese.
In conclusion, because if I stay on this matter, matter no go ever end (walahi, Naija problems too plenty 😡), I have chosen measures that are fast and brutal and expensive to ensure maximum change in minimum time. Of course, things like roads and fuel scarcity matter too and of course they would be tackled but I think a rejuvenated Giant of Africa under my leadership (haha) would not be sliding backwards with the sand trying to hold onto technologies and certainties that are being left behind by the world. Instead it would be leapfrogging forward to new technologies and new solutions that render the old problems as the irrelevant obstacles they should be by now.
for 
. I dey hail ooooo(Oga
Want a resurgent Africa? Want a doomed Africa that is determined to seize that doom by the jaws and rend that lion's mouth asunder? This is one way that might happen. Our entrepreneurial spirit will handle the rest.
You might enjoy other stuff written by me such as:
Human History X: The Mapmakers
Geospatial Big Data: The Magic of Maps and Money
Barbarian Bushmen of the Blockchain (honestly, this might be my favourite thing I ever wrote on Steemit -- not the best but my personal favourite)
