NIGERIA IS DISTRESSED FROM SCARCITY MINDSET
√ The strongest economies in the world have reached where they are today due to the fact, among other things, that they have a largely inclusive societies where all those who can bring something positive to the table are welcome. The stories of how the son of a Kenyan student became the American President, and of how the son of a Hungarian immigrant became the French President, do not need to be retold as proof of the inclusiveness of those societies.
So what is the way out of this scarcity mind-set and its effects? As long as our economic model where petrodollars run the country and there is no incentive to spur production so that the society and government can be the richer for it, these forms of discrimination will continue. We have to create competition between states and local governments. This should bring a much needed spirit of competitiveness into public service, which would hopefully drive out and barriers. Simply put, organizations and societies built on sentiments cannot survive competition.
This is one of the major reasons I continually advocate true fiscal federalism. It is the only form of political-economic system of government that will not only reduce the powers of the center and transfer same to the component unit, but also force the states to reform in order to live up to their responsibilities of raising enough revenue to create wealth and providing for the needs of their for their people. In the process of reformation, trivial matters such as ‘indigene’ and ‘settler’ will eventually die away.
We can continue to create laws that attempt to create an equal-opportunity society, but they will do little to deal with discrimination unless we change the conditions that create discrimination. It is only by doing so that we can truly deal with these issues, issues that should have been dealt with in ages past and which hold us back as a nation..
