ATIKU, AS DANGEROUS AS EVER! By Cham Faliya Sharon
ATIKU, AS DANGEROUS AS EVER!
By Cham Faliya Sharon
When an old Customs officer promises to throw Nigeria’s borders wide open for smugglers and all manner of criminals if he becomes President, then we are in danger!
Immediately General Sani Abacha died, and after General Abdulsalam Abubakar hurriedly handed over power to the most hungry and rapacious hyenas masquerading as politicians in 1999, they flung our borders open, thinking it was the recipe for economic prosperity but which ended up incentivising the smuggling and importation of all manner of goods, which consequently led to the total collapse of local factories and local food production.
The results were the death of all the textiles in Kaduna, Gusau, Kano and the death of other factories like STEYR in Bauchi, LEYLAND in Kano, PAN in Kaduna, Volkswagen in Ibadan, FIAT in Lagos, and many others across the country. Subsequently, all the farming activities that fed those textile factories with cotton died. In fact, the deliberate neglect of local food production in favour of imported varieties caused a near collapse of farming in Nigeria, as those politicians saw it as a status symbol for themselves and their cronies to be seen to be buying and eating foreign food items.
To say that open borders killed local productivity and consequently entrenched acute poverty in Nigeria is even an understatement. That consequence is still living with us today, and it mere made us a dumping ground for rich foreign farmers and foreign producers of other items. They kept getting richer and richer at our expense while our farmers and other local industrialists kept getting poorer and poorer, with companies folding up and jobs getting lost in their millions.
The remedy is tightening up the borders to encourage the production of what we can conveniently produce just as the Buhari administration is doing. It is not always easy. It always induces shortages, which consequently comes with price rises, but the shortages are always necessary to induce the production and promotion of local alternatives. At first they may look rough, but with steady growth and encouragements, they end up looking great like their foreign alternatives. Take example of Nigeria’s local rice. Doesn’t it now look so smooth and polished like the foreign types? It does.
What neoColonialists like Atiku Abubakar will never tell you is, no country can ever achieve self-sufficiency in anything without tightening its borders. This is the crux of the negotiations between the United Kingdom and the European Union when the former wanted to exit the EU common market in what we got to know as BREXIT. When you open your country’s borders for just about anything, what point are you even trying to prove? You are even simply trying to say that you have failed, and cannot try as much as possible to even produce anything locally.
Of course, when President Muhammadu Buhari rightfully ordered the closure of our borders against the inflow of goods that we can produce, failed politicians like Atiku Abubakar and their media partners began ramping up their usually irrational propaganda that the President has brought hunger! To them, the remedy for hunger is opening up the borders for smugglers and rent-seekers to throw in anything and everything into the country’s markets. But we have been through this before, and we have seen the results.
Promising to end hunger by throwing Nigeria’s borders open is one of the greatest deceptions that can be weaved and promounced by any politician, especially when we recall that this same hunger and poverty was institutionalized when the same politicians ruled this country with open borders, so much that it is the same Buhari that is now paying workers of companies that collapsed during those years of open borders their entitlements.
The proposal by Atiku Abubakar is as dangerous as Atiku Abubakar running any public enterprise, even much more running a country that is emerging from the disasters foisted by people like Atiku Abubakar.
