I still remember growing up in my own part of Nigeria when we did not have crude petroleum but had cocoa, palm oil, rubber and lots of hardwood timber which our regional government exported and the proceeds were spent on running the administration while a big part of it was saved against a rainy day.
Some of the savings was used to support producer prices whenever the prices fell in the so-called world market as a result of over production. Stability of producer price was necessary to encourage the farmers who produced the export products.
The marketing board that managed these savings was insulated as much as possible from political interference.
It was the British colonial government that set this marketing board up and by the time we had party and responsible government in 1951, millions of pounds sterling had accumulated as savings which the Awolowo government in the Western Region had access to from 1951 to 1959.
Marketing boards were also set up for the Eastern and Northern regions of Nigeria but because those regions produced palm oil and palm kernel in the case of the East and groundnuts, cotton and hides and skins in the case of the North, they did not have the kind of money which cocoa brought into the coffers of the western Nigerian treasury.
The year 1955 begins the period I am talking about when I was in my final year in primary school during the first year of the Action Group’s government’s free and compulsory primary school education scheme.
My set moved from standard four to join with those in standard five to transit to primary six and the number of years spent in primary school was shortened from eight years to six years.
There was fear that standards will be lowered but nothing of such happened and my set took entrance examinations to various secondary schools in the Western Region preparatory to starting in form one in January 1956.
Most of us only took entrance examinations to schools in the Western Region. Certainly not to Lagos! None of our teachers encouraged us to do so because of what was said to be the corrupting influence of the coastal city.
And our parents would not hear of us going to Benin and Warri provinces for fear of the distance and differences in languages. There were a few intrepid ones who braved going there.
It was the best of times. We were all enjoying heavenly paradise here in Ekiti and the Western Region and in the country as a whole.
One could travel to anywhere without molestation by the police or armed robbers and Fulani herders minded their business as we did ours.
Everything was good. We were not rich neither were we poor. During our holidays, we joined our parents on the farms and those whose parents were traders hawked their wares on the street.
Running family economies was a joint programme of parents, children, cousins and all kinds of relations with everybody making a contribution.
The family unit was highly valued and our parents made sure they kept a tight hold on everyone and made sure they knew what was going on in everybody’s life.
They also drummed into our ears about the importance of having a good name. A good name is better than diamonds and gold; they would say.
Honour was more important than wealth. My father didn’t mind if I fought in school as long as I won. You were not permitted to come home crying that a classmate of about the same age as yourself beat you up.
We only had new clothes at Christmas and new year. If you were reasonably well off, you got a pair of shoes as a bargain. This puritanical life style was embraced by everybody that I knew.
Our bigger and older brothers were in high schools and some were even in universities and our parents made us realize if we too worked hard and read our books, we too will go to high schools and reach the top.
There was little career counselling, all we were told is read your books. Even when we were in secondary school, there was little or no career counselling apart from going to university to earn degrees in English, History, Geography, Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Mathematics and become teachers.
It was grand being teachers in those days especially graduate teachers owning cars. Those who studied Medicine were guided into it by the “hands of God”.
It was not until later that we learnt that one could study Law, Accountancy, Engineering, Insurance and Finance. Going into the military or police was a no-go area.
In spite of the limitations of our rural environment we did well. Our peasant upbringing endowed us with all that was honest and honourable.
We never stole; we never embezzled or envied any one. We were satisfied with whatever it pleased the Almighty God to put in our hands in terms of shelter and ability to send our children to school like our parents did.
We did not know anyone who became rich by being a civil servant. Politics when it entered our part of Nigeria was a call to serve not to eat .
The only rich people we knew were contractors and Cocoa merchants. We thought our country or shall I say our region, will regenerate itself and our children will have the opportunity we had to live in a peaceful environment. But we were wrong.
Our self-sustaining region was in 1957 made a self-governing part of Nigeria. We still retained control over our lives and contributed financially to the central treasury which relied largely on import and excise duties as well as charges on currency, posts and telegraphs, railways and shipping, and aviation.
The regions continued to run their affairs as autonomous entities within the federation of Nigeria and enjoying common services of police and defence.
The regions ran their own affairs competitively and cooperatively. Crude petroleum was discovered in Oloibiri (Bayelsa State) in the East but this did not make huge impact on the East which remained the Cinderella of the Nigerian family relations.
As we progressed towards independence, the fierce competition for control of the centre began. The northern hegemony epitomized by the NPC in the centre was then aided by the eastern subservience of the NCNC.
Then began the race to fill the posts being vacated by the British and to pack the ministries and parastatals with the ethnic cohorts of largely easterners.
Obafemi Awolowo who in all his political life had favoured strong regions appeared to have abandoned his position when he decided to challenge the NPC/NCNC chokehold on the centre by resigning as premier of the Western Region to go to the centre.
With historical hindsight, he should have stayed in the West like his political enemy Ahmadu Bello stayed on in the North and sent his lieutenant Abubakar Tafawa Balewa to the centre as lame-duck prime minister which he would have remained if Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello had maintained their federal principled posture as they did in the Lancaster pre-Independence conference of 1959.
This wrong tactical move sealed the fate of the carefully negotiated agreement for the disparate regions to remain together.
These were territories big enough to be separate countries. They entered into what has turned out into an unhappy marriage which the military-forced unitary system of 1966 has worsened .
Nevertheless the free for all looting and the crazy feeding frenzy on national treasury which began after the civil war ended in 1970 and has gotten worse and worse in a country where anything goes!
Now we hear government wants to sell the airports obviously to politicians from favoured part of the country just like the power sector was sold to people who knew nothing about how to generate and distribute electricity.
How does one explain the fact that the main source of the country’s wealth goes unaudited for years? The various parastatals in the oil industry are run not with the aim to earn income and augment national income but to consume whatever comes in from sales of crude oil and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).
Yet we complain that the country has no roads, no railways, no modern ports and airports. We have no hydro or any sort of efficient electric power.
We have written and written that the dollar-guzzling petroleum refineries and petrochemical industries should be sold. We said it to Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan, and we say it again to Buhari.
The money we are queuing up in various capitals of the world to borrow would have been unnecessary if we ran our oil industry profitably.
Unfortunately this will continue until the crude oil in our hands becomes unprofitable and unsellable .Those running our oil industry should just compare ourselves with the following countries in OPEC namely UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela.
Even with the American sabotage of Iran and Venezuela and war in Iraq, they still have superior infrastructure than Nigeria. The roads we used to travel on have all been washed away because of poor construction arising from corruption and kickbacks from those who constructed them.
Nemesis has now caught up with us. The poor have left the villages to waylay us on the highways and rob and attack us in the cities.
The poor are now demanding their own share of our common patrimony which a few have appropriated. The rich can no longer sleep because the poor are hungry and angry.
Before it is too late we must go back to the negotiated constitutional agreement that led us to Independence to avoid current and future head-butts.