Whoever is Nigeria's next president has to adopt a policy of "The fierce urgency of now" because by 2050 we will be the third most populous nation on earth

Ayo Akinfe

[1] Dr Martin Luther King always spoke about "The fierce urgency of now" pointing out that gradualism was the killer of goals and dreams. Are we aware of that in Nigeria at all?

[2] It is projected that by 2050, Nigeria will have a population of 400m, making her the third most populous nation in the world after India and China

[3] We naively believe that the rest of the world has the capacity to supply 400m with enough automobiles, telephone handsets, laptop computers, defence equipment, pharmaceuticals, luxury goods, aircraft, trains, etc. Well, we are in for a big surprise as no nation is going to establish a dedicated Nigerian manufacturing zone

[4] What made the US civil rights movement and the fight against apartheid successful was their emphasis on the here and now. Nothing was postponed until a future date and nobody spoke about “waiting to see how things pan out first.” No one certainly prayed for God to intervene with a biblical miracle as we currently do in Nigeria

[5] I for one just love Dr King’s theory of the fierce urgency of now. In that his famous I Have a Dream speech, he spoke of how: “We cannot afford the tranquilising drug of gradualism.”

[6] It is unfortunate that the masses of the world’s largest black nation, Nigeria have not got this message. Nigeria is classed a Mint economy along with Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey but alas, look at the gulf in the size of our productivity and GDP. Mexico ($1.15trn), Indonesia ($1.01trn), Turkey ($851bn) and Nigeria ($375bn)

[7] I can dig up similar figures for kilometres of tarred road, number of hospital beds, megawatts of electricity generated, percentage of the populace with access to pipe-borne water, etc. We are falling behind our contemporaries and the longer this goes on, the wider that gulf will get

[8] I am particularly scared about China at the moment as they are taking humanity to unprecedented heights. Some of the things they are doing are just out of sci-fi futuristic films. Growing food in urban factories, building artificial moons to power their cities and manufacturing trains that run at 400km an hour, just blow my head away. It has not occurred to us in Nigeria that the further we fall behind, the easier it is for us to become a dumping ground and eternal consumer

[9] Has it occurred to everyone that China does not have a personality cult? Their last big personality leader was Mao Tse Tung, which is why I laugh when people talk about the Nigerian president expected to be the messiah. Come to think of it, would Nigerians ever elect a Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela or Barack Obama as their president? Such a candidate would get less than 5% of the vote. Our people would ask him straight up: “Na policy we go chop?”

[10] We are facing the risk of being left behind in the global rat race and something urgent needs to be done to catch up. Most of the developing nations at the same level of socio-economic development as us such as Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia all have GDPs in excess of $1trn. Nigeria needs to set herself a target of joining that club by 2030 at the very latest