Let me rant about this for a minute. It’s something I feel enough attention is not paid to. This tweet, and many like it, are because of what crude oil does to a country.

The psychological effect of Dutch Disease ...1/n https://twitter.com/lazyreo/status/1301987879845941249

The discovery of crude oil
The discovery of the uses of crude oil
The discovery of crude oil refining
The discovery of the exploration of crude oil

Nigeria was not present for any of these things. Nigeria entered the group chat *after* they happened

So you get a situation where all of a sudden you are awash with dollars when people have found crude oil, found uses for it, found how to refine it, found how to explore it - and then they want plenty of the stuff which you just happen to have

We know the effect of this on the currency hence the Dutch Disease. But what it does to people *psychologically* is hardly talked about. To be clear, nothing wrong with hitting a natural resource lottery. Plenty of countries around the world have been blessed in one way or other

The problem starts when the leaders and elite start to *believe* that this resource lottery makes their country special. And this kind of thinking is RAMPANT in Nigeria. The mentality of “we have everything we need”. We don’t have to do much, it’s all there waiting for us

One of the best recent examples of this mentality was this comment from Meffy last year ( https://guardian.ng/news/why-we-must-restrict-importation-of-milk-by-cbn/) This is the oil mentality at work - Nigeria only got in the oil chain at the *end* so thinks everything is like that

What Meffy is talking about there took centuries of trial and error to figure out. Again, if you were not there, it will look easy to you. What do we need for milk? Just cows, grass and water. We have everything we need.

If you did not grow up in a society where the water-to-wine riches of oil has happened, you will never make simplistic assumptions like this. Or if you had very extreme weather changes, you won’t just assume that ‘corn grows everywhere’ so why import?

When I was growing up in Kaduna, we had some land beside our house where my mum used to plant stuff every year. Corn, beans, yam, egusi. End of year she would give most of it out as gifts to people for Christmas. The corn was planted by my brother and I. Easy stuff, just plant

It was many many years later I realised that we shouldn’t have been replanting seeds from the harvest. We should have been buying new high quality seeds each year to plant. But of course I too thought ‘corn grows everywhere anyhow’

Stuff like this is manageable when ordinary people believe it. But when the leaders of a country not just believe it but actively fuel it, you’re going to be jogging on the spot for a while. It is just a cycle of “why are we importing this when we can grow it?” Ban. Tears. Unban

Every time the Govt or the CBN does one madness or the other, you’ll see people coming out angrily to ask why it was being imported in the first place when Nigeria “has everything it needs” to be self sufficient.

Well, who are you asking?