‘…about 30m sustainable and remunerative new jobs must be created to end the current scourge of terrorism, kidnapping, armed robbery, banditry, etc. With the African Development Bank making it crystal clear that Nigeria has an annual infrastructural deficit of $100bn, we desperately need investment in our economy and where better to start than with our former colonial masters who created Nigeria in the first place!’
STANDFIRST – Under a process that began in 1851, the UK put together an amalgam of about 350 ethnic groups to form Nigeria. It was her third most prized colony after India and Egypt and now that nation needs investment badly
HISTORICALLY, Nigeria and the United Kingdom have always been trading partners of one sort or the other over the centuries, dating back to pre-colonial and pre-slavery times. With Nigeria now coming of age as a 62-year-old nation state, it is time this relationship blossomed into one involving fully fledged industrial partners centred around foreign direct investment (FDI).
Back in 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May visited Nigeria and launched a £70m programme aimed at creating 100,000 jobs as part of an aggressive anti-poverty plan to raise the income of 3m people from the poorest parts of the country. Nigeria currently has the highest number of very poor people in the world with 87m living below the poverty line of $1.90 cents per day and Mrs May said that Africa needs to create 50,000 new jobs per day to keep employment rate at its current levels till 2035.
During that visit, Harriett Baldwin, the UK minister of State for Africa, said: “We are here today to talk about technology links between the UK Fintech sector and the Nigerian Fintech sector and will bring inward investment in terms of this important sector of technology. Today, it is all about celebrating those links through technology and I am very excited that the prime minister is announcing today a new £70m programme that will create some 100,000 jobs in Nigeria and will also raise the income of 3m people from the poorest parts of Nigeria.”
Vice president Yemi Osinbajo, responded by saying: “I think just looking at some of the start-ups that we see today, many of them started while the recession was on and they proved by just a number of jobs, value and wealth created, that this is the future starting today. This is why we have started up first with the creativity and technology advisory group and many of these start-ups are members of this group where they help to formulate policies with federal government policymakers especially in fintech, which are some of the new areas we need to formulate policies.”
According to Professor Osinbajo, there was the need to create the right environment for technology companies to thrive. At the event, he gave further assurances of the government’s commitment to support innovation in the country.
No country on earth should be more committed to investing in Nigeria than the UK because she was the creator of the country. Way back on August 30 1894, British explorer Frederick Lugard began his expedition of the Niger which led to the eventual creation of the nation state called Nigeria.
Over the next 20 years, Lugard had captured nearly 1m square kilometres, subduing about 20m people from 250 different ethnic groups. He created the biggest and most lucrative British colony south of the Sahara to the envy of the Germans and French.
After India and maybe Egypt, Nigeria was Britain’s third most prized possession worldwide. Within Nigeria’s borders you had unprecedented wealth. Palm oil, cocoa, rubber, groundnuts, cattle, coconuts, timber, etc were all widely available and what made Nigeria even greater was that the British could introduce crops like cocoa from South America or rice from Asia and they would just grow in abundance
Many other British colonies had to be subsided at the outset but alas, Nigeria was self-financing from the word go. In the Northern Protectorate, for instance, revenue quickly increased from £4,424 in 1901 to £274,989 in 1910. Down south, the Southern Protectorate financed itself from the outset, with revenue increasing from £361,815 in 1901 to £1,933,235 in 1910
Gross domestic product (GDP) increased 62-fold over a nine-year period in the Northern Protectorate, while in the Southern Protectorate, GDP more than doubled, multiplying by 2.6% fold between 1901 and 1910. Nationwide, this meant that Nigeria’s GDP grew from £366,239 in 1901 to £2.2m in 1910.
Within nine years the economy grew six-fold. If we were to replicate what Frederick Lugard did in the early 20 century today, our economy would grow from $375bn in 2019 to $2.25trn in 2028
Some people blame the British for their ruthlessness in Nigeria but alas, they had a mission. Frederick Lugard had no time for sentiments, he wanted raw materials and he made sure he got them. He built a narrow gauge railway track meant to carry cargo from Kano to both Lagos and Port Harcourt and had no interest in the humans that occupied Nigeria. For him, the end justified the means
If the British wanted to build a railway track for humans, it would have been standard gauge and Port Harcourt would have been linked to Lagos too but alas, they were on a mission to create a cash cow and did it effectively. Do you know, for instance, that in 1936, of the £6,259,547 income generated for the Nigerian state, £1,156,000 went back to England as home pay for British officials?
We have to find a way to recreate this magic by making Nigeria a manufacturing economy that churns out consumer and industrial goods in their millions. Today, Lagos is the only state in Nigeria that can survive without federal allocation and crude oil receipts but alas, it is nowhere near uhuru. For all its dynamism and vibrancy, Lagos is nowhere near other global financial centres like New York, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, Kuala Lumpur and Sao Paulo.
In 1851, Britain was the world’s leading maritime power and should have built at least two shipyards along the Nigerian coast. In 1851 they should have built one in Lagos and then one should have opened in Calabar when it became the capital of the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1906. Not one canoe or propeller was even built in Nigeria, which for me is totally unacceptable. That is racism at its worst. What they were effectively saying is we were ignorant primates not worthy of sharing technology with
Do you know that more than 3m tonnes of shipping were built in the British shipyards on the River Wear and other north east yards alone between 1914 and 1918? At the time, the Tyne boasted of 19 shipyards of various sizes, with five capable of handling Dreadnoughts, the new breed of heavy battleship.
In addition to merchant ships, Tyne alone managed to build one-third of the world’s battleships, 19% of its cruisers, 28% of its destroyers, 29% of naval escorts and 14% of the world’s submarines during World War One. In 2006, British shipbuilding giant Swan Hunter ceased vessel construction on Tyneside but continues to provide design engineering services up until today. Were we not asleep at the time, in 2006, we should have asked them to relocate their shipyard to Calabar.
If we can attract $85bn in FDI to Nigeria annually and then get domestic industrialists to invest a further $15bn in the economy, we should be fine as an economy. As things stand today, we are facing a crisis because Chinese overseas investment is slowing down and the Nigeria State no longer has the cash to take out stakes in commercial ventures.
By my calculations, about 30m sustainable and remunerative new jobs must be created to end the current scourge of terrorism, kidnapping, armed robbery, banditry, etc. With the African Development Bank making it crystal clear that Nigeria has an annual infrastructural deficit of $100bn, we desperately need investment in our economy and where better to start than with our former colonial masters who created Nigeria in the first place!
*Akinfe, journalist and writer, is chairman of the Central Association of Nigerians in the UK (Canuk)
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