No matter how much I wrack my brains over this matter I cannot but come to the conclusion that Nigeria needs to find a Shangri-La to kick start her economy

Ayo Akinfe

(1) If you look at all the major modern economies worldwide, it was some big discovery that sparked their sudden rise as everyone went there in search of a pot of gold. Nigeria simply needs to follow this well-trodden route

(2) America went from being an agrarian backwater to becoming a major industrial power when the Californian gold rush began in 1848. Do you know that news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the US and abroad? This sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy. Today, just look at California

(3) Likewise, it was the quest for the highly lucrative whale oil that made Australia a major global attraction. Ships from all over the world went there to hunt the large population of whales in its coastal waters

(4) Ask yourselves if Saudi Arabia would be as developed as it is today were it not home to the Kaaba

(5) With a population of 200m, a paltry gross domestic product (GDP) of $375bn and a woefully inadequate budget of $28.8bn, Nigeria is just going round in incoherent economic circles. For me, Nigeria needs to come up with some big discovery that will spark a gold rush and attract investors in their millions. Organic growth will simply not do it as for starters, our population is growing at a rate of about 4% per annum, so we need to force the pace of development

(6) What I have in mind is something so full of mystique it will capture the imagination of the whole of mankind. Shangri-La for instance is a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains in Tibet. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia, a permanently happy land, isolated from the world. Imagine if we uncovered such a place in Nigeria

(7) For me, our Shangri-La will need to be built around some religious relic. Imagine we discovered some missing biblical relic like the Ark of the Covenant, the skeleton of Goliath of Gath, Noah’s Ark or the remains of the Tower of Babel? It would attract maybe about 10m visitors a year with maybe some $200bn in foreign direct investment (FDI) that would spark off the Nigerian economic renaissance

(8) If you ask me, the relic most likely to be found in Nigeria are the remains of the Tower of Babel. How can Nigeria and Cameroon between them account for 10% of the world’s population? Something needs to be investigated here

(9) Who is to say this tower is not somewhere along the Nigeria-Cameroon border? Let us face it, were the recently discovered Koma people found in Europe or the Middle East, they would have been commercialised as the guardians and defenders of the tower. Nigeria missed a huge commercial trick when we uncovered those poor people. Just imagine how the tourist revenue could have been used to better their lives

(10) Were I Nigeria’s trade minister, I would launch a project called Operation Shangri-La this year. Its purpose would be to create this big bang that would make Nigeria a tourist and investment haven. All this piecemeal FDI will simply not cut it!