Should Nigeria's 2023 residential candidates just have three basic manifesto pledges - Security, power and tourism

Ayo Akinfe

[1] I am sure a lot of you get asked why Nigeria is so populated often. How come about half of the 360m people living in West Africa are Nigerian and one in five Africans is Nigerian? Even countries with more arable land like DR Congo, Angola and Tanzania are not as populated as us. How many of you have the answers?

[2] Nigeria is essentially seven African countries put together- Oyo Empire, Niger Delta City States, Benin Empire, Igbo City States, Middle Belt City States, Kanem-Borno Empire and the Sokoto Caliphate. These old nations are not homogeneous and are complex. Your average African country like say Ghana, Zambia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, etc is the equivalent of one of these seven component parts of Nigeria in terms of complexity and diversity

[3] I wonder how many artefacts are buried somewhere in remote villages that could shed more light on the history of these seven component parts of Nigeria. For instance, a skull, found in the Iwo Eleru cave in Nigeria in 1965, does not look like that of a modern human. It is longer and flatter with a strong brow ridge and features closer to a much older skull from Tanzania, thought to be around 140,000 years old. Are there more of such skulls littered across Nigeria?

[4] Is it possible that Nigeria was ever home to some ancient civilisation we do not yet know about? Well the answer lies in our savannah belt as the tropical rain forest was not suitable to human habitation until relatively recently. Even then, when people moved into the forest, they did so in small groups and lived in little hamlets and villages, not massive savannah empires like Mali, Ghana, Songhai, Kanem-Borno, Sokoto, Oyo, etc. By and large, West Africans are not a forest people like those from the Congo

[5] One place that has always fascinated me in Nigeria is Lokoja. For me, it should have the same mythical status as Mesopotamia as it is the confluence of the two rivers in the world’s largest black nation. Bearing in mind humanity came from Africa, why is Lokoja not a candidate for the Garden of Eden and the birthplace of humanity?

[6] It is not disputed that human settlements first sprung up on river banks, confluences and river valleys like Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates in modern day Iraq, the Nile Valley in Ancient Egypt, the Ghanges Valley, etc, so why is the Niger-Benue confluence not an automatic candidate? As usual, we are waiting for our Abrahamic faiths and their so-called holy books to tell us so before we even think about it. Well, if that is what works, I can think of a way around it

[7] Present day Lokoja was established in 1857 by the British explorer William Baikie at the site of an earlier model farm constructed during the failed Niger expedition of 1841. However, who is to say that earlier settlements of Homo Erectus, Homo Habilis, Homo Neanderthalis, Homo Heidelbergis, etc do not exist there. Why could a colony of Neanderthals not have lived happily in Lokoja prior to the Ice Age

[8] Do you know that we are still to find fossils of many of our ancestors as we evolved? Somewhere in Africa there are bones of every early man and I think we should set ourselves the task of uncovering these fossils. I am inclined to start from our major towns on the Rivers Niger and Benue like Lokoja, Jebba and Yola

[9] One other place that desperately needs a major expedition is the Nigeria/Cameroon border. These two countries account for about 3% of the world’s population between them, yet 10% of its languages. It is common sense that if the Tower of Babel exists, it is out there on their border somewhere near the Mambilla Plateau. Who knows, those Koma people may have descended from its original custodians kind of like the Knights of the Templar

[10] You know, these are the kind of thoughts that your tourism minister should toy with on a daily basis. Nigeria has the added advantage of having a lot of clergymen who could give religious legitimacy to any new discovery. If I was Nigeria’s tourism minister and we found the ruins of a castle along the border with Cameroon, on my first visit there, I would take along Adeboye, Oyedepo, Ashimolowo, Oritsejafor, Okotie, etc. As from that year onwards, Nigeria would generate a minimum of $100bn in foreign exchange earnings from tourism annually