The present situation in Nigeria calls for serious intellectual engagement because any progress made or envisaged will depend on refinement at the intellectual level. Therefore, one wonders why there is questionable intellectual silence and pretence everywhere while professors and other intellectuals expect politicians to perform the miracle of fixing the problems without any established knowledge or research.
We face the question of how to attract a large number of inventors, innovators and creative thinkers because many grassroots solutions go unnoticed or are overlooked. More so, peculiar situations such as those in Nigeria require outright out-of-the-box creative thinking. A challenge is therefore urgently needed to bring such inventions and innovations to the public domain.
At the forefront of this challenge is a just concluded 40-year multidisciplinary research study into the sustainable development of the grassroots population. From 1981 to 2021, two frontline intellectuals of the University of Lagos: Professor Isaac Ayinde Adalemo, Professor Emeritus of Geography/former Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos; and Professor Oyewusi Ibidapo-Obe, Professor Emeritus of Engineering System/former Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos /Founding Vice Chancellor of Federal University in Ebonyi State (both of them now of blessed memories), mentored a multi-disciplinary research study in rethinking a new concept of sustainable grassroots development. This writer has the unique privilege of being mentored by the two emeritus professors over the past 40 years in this great endeavour and also becoming a co-founder of the Development & Empowerment Society International with them.
The out-of-the-box creative thinking can be summarised that the planet Earth with its humanity is an integral part of a self-organising, self-sustaining and ever-burgeoning universe. It is a set of system sustainability laws to organise the entire universal system, incorporating innumerable trillions of stars and planets for automatic sustainability and systemic prosperity. It implies that the same system sustainability laws must be clearly discerned, adapted and replicated in order to usher in an era of automatic sustainability and systemic prosperity in the human situation.
The out-of-the-box creative thinking also sums up that the adaptation and replication of the universal model would systematically de-myth money and redesign the money system in order to make money the servant of the creation and protection of real wealth. Adaptation would also systematically make speculation unprofitable and limit the growth of financial bubbles, stimulate cooperation and integration among people and communities; reward productive work; create a just distribution of claims to real wealth; provide incentives for patient and locally rooted investment in real assets; and strengthen the social fabric of family and community.
The great research carried out under the aegis of Afronomics Institute/ DESI invented the Automatically Sustainable Community – which introduces a universal sustainability investment regime that would self-finance the creation of AUTOSUCOM, its infrastructure and total jobs for members of the community. The significance of the AUTOSUCOM invention is that it is capable of creating at least 2 million new jobs in each of the 36 states of Nigeria, amounting to 72 million new jobs outrightly financed by a multi-trillion dollar sustainability investment fund created by the invention itself.
In discussing this great invention, there is the need to draw attention to the strange fact that there is yet an unidentified cause of underdevelopment. This strange fact is that the underdevelopment of the grassroots population is a direct correlate to the absence of a specialised field of knowledge for achieving sustainable greatness and mightiness; and that great and mighty men and women of this world have not been able to attain sustainable greatness and mightiness as ordained in the universal space.
Time and again, it has been said that imperialists destroyed the traditional economic systems of the third world and replaced them with a production system that produced well for the imperialists’ consumption. Therefore, underdevelopment is usually explained as a continuing relationship of exploitation where the entire economic surplus is not available for reinvestment at any level of the chain that could benefit the exploited. Imperialists have employed predatory socioeconomic and political philosophies to achieve greatness and mightiness based on the existing knowledge for achieving such. But the unknown truth up till now is that predation or oppression has the element of a breaking point, which brings about a reversal of attained greatness or mightiness as witnessed by the rise and fall of great empires throughout history.
The breaking point is reached when the oppressed begin to fight or agitate for freedom or independence from the oppressor. In emerging international sustainable development concept, independence is a misnomer. The new word is integration. Obviously, no reasonable person will seek separation, independence or disengagement from a prosperous relationship that meets his or her heart desire. This is also very true even if the relationship came about through a form of forced cohesion as in governance.
The breaking point is usually the beginning of contradiction which means that the oppressor would not achieve sustainable greatness or mightiness as he would have wished as it is perpetually modeled in the universal space.
An outstanding example of such contradiction of self-interest and non-attainment of sustainable greatness and mightiness is Great Britain. By the year 1919, Great Britain had reached her full height as the greatest empire in history. For over a century, she was a foremost global power. She held sway over numerous countries and territories. According to the British Historian, Stuart Laycock, out of the 193 countries that are currently UN members, the British invaded or fought in the territories of 171, which is about 90 per cent.
The first setback for Great Britain came from colonised America. The predatory exploits of King George III of Great Britain and his ruling team were vehemently repelled by colonised America. Consequently, the American war of independence was fought as a necessity. The Americans won the war and declared their independence from Great Britain in 1776.
It appeared that the American experience had set a model for all other colonies to follow. Accordingly, one after the other, the rest of the colonies agitated and secured their independence from Great Britain.
Notwithstanding the perilous exploration undertaken by Great Britain to achieve greatness, the knowledge gap of how to achieve sustainable greatness has forced the greatness being sought to wane to a level of unimaginable smallness. Today, Great Britain has been reduced to the United Kingdom. Let us suppose that the knowledge existed at that time that Great Britain could sustain her mightiness by investing in the integration of all the colonies into systemic prosperity, her mightiness would have known no bounds today.
After independence, the general pattern in the former colonies, particularly in Africa, is that the powerful elite predated, oppressed and usurped virtually most of the resources needed for the overall development of the general population for their personal aggrandizement.
This problem is further compounded by the multi-ethnic structure of African nations in which dominant ethnic groups predate vulnerable ones, a phenomenon now known as internal colonisation.
The predation and oppression of the grassroots population by the elite of Africa in general and Nigeria, in particular, has also reached a breaking point of contradiction. The untold hardship unleashed on the grassroots population has resulted in the radicalisation of the majority of redundant grassroots population into a new wave of criminal and wicked activities as a mode of living. This manifested in widespread kidnapping for ransom payment and killing for rituals, internet fraud, armed robberies etc. This has resulted in constant threats to the lives of the elite and their families as the general population become systematically ungovernable.
