President Buhari should be working on a list of demands for whoever takes over from Boris Johnson

Ayo Akinfe

[1] In what way has Nigeria benefitted from it membership of Briatin's Commonwealth? Can you think of a more one-sided bilateral relationship?

[2] For starters, Britain is a country well renown for its expertise in several sectors including tunnelling, coal mining and steel making for instance. No British prime minister has ever pushed for a group of experts to help Nigeria in these industries

[3] Do you know that the man known as the world’s father of tunnelling was a British engineer named John Norton-Griffiths. During World War One, he was the man who came up with the idea of digging tunnels beneath the German trenches, allowing the allied powers to get behind their lines and subsequently win the war.

[4] After the war, Mr Norton-Griffith was awarded contracts to carry out major engineering projects in Africa and South America. These included work on the first 197km of the Benguela Railway in Angola between 1903 and 1908. His construction firm also took on a contract to carry out the heightening of Egypt’s Aswan Low Dam

[5] His pioneering work was what led to the construction of the London Underground. His methods are still being used to this very day as the UK expands the network. Lagos in particular desperately needs such skills as a city of 12m simply cannot survive without an urban underground network

[6] In the area of coal mining too, Nigeria could benefit from British expertise. Just imagine what British coal miners could do if taken to Enugu

[7] Do you know that Sheffield was at one time renown as the European steel capital? Yet, we have Ajaokuta rotting away. No Nigerian president has deemed iot fit to ask a British prime minister to give us a team of steel engineers to revive the moribund facility

[8] Do you know that half of the world’s monarchs are in Nigeria? This is a terrible drain on the public purse. Malaysia had a similar situation to us at independence but they decided to merge their monarchies and have just six. They now rotate the King of Malaysia title among them. I am surprised that no British prime minister has ever apologised for creating so many monarchs in Nigeria

[9] With us having three tiers of government, traditional monarchs are just figure heads. They do not serve any official function and you have to ask yourselves is their any justification for having more than say - The Alaafin of Oyo, the Sultan of Sokoto, the Shehu of Borno, the Obi of Onitsha, the Obong of Calabar and the Oba of Benin. In Britain the amount the public spends on the royal family is being cut daily. We need to do likewise to free up government money for schools, roads, hospitals, clinics, etc. It was the British who gave us so many monarchs who they appointed to serve as tax collectors

[10] Britain created Nigeria and left her sitting on a keg of gunpowder. As far as I am concerned, the British have to take responsibility for a lot of the problems they created. First and foremost, Nigeria needs a minimum annual investment figure from Britain each year. We have poverty, restlessness and violence in our land because of a lack of industrialisation and job creation. Britain should be obliged to address this by investing at least £1bn a year in Nigeria. Such investment should be tax deductible to encourage it!