By Pius Adesanmi

In my entire adult life, every government in Nigeria has mouthed the platitude of economic diversification. Whether military or civilian, every administration has gone to the Aso Rock Villa screaming her determination to wean Nigeria of oil dependency from the rooftops. Such administrations wax nostalgic about the groundnut pyramids of Kano, the rubber and palm oil days of the Edo/Delta axis, the cocoa plantations and other cash crops of the southwest. You hear of the abundance of solid minerals that we need to tap into all over the country. And patati. And patata.

To the best of my knowledge, no government has ever delivered on this promise of diversification. The one and the repeated tragic pattern of Nigeria’s political elite has been to get to the Villa and get drunk on oil. On occasion, they send the Minister of Finance or the Minister of Agriculture or the Minister of Solid Minerals to go and tell economic diversification lies to the international community.

Then everybody returns to Abuja to continue to gorge on oil while watching the Avengers on CNN or Al Jazeera as they destroy their own land and people while stupidly believing that they are really destabilizing the oil-derived personal bank accounts of those who really matter in Abuja. You may destabilize Nigeria’s income with your terrorism. Nothing do the personal billions of your real targets. Na mumu dey worry una.

However, and still to the best of my knowledge, President Buhari is the only one to have gone to the Villa with a peculiar understanding of the concept of economic diversification as the ability of the Federal government to diversify the supply of oil by finding crude oil in the North, hence the obsessive missionary zeal with which he has been uprooting every dogon yaro tree across the vast expanse of the North, looking for oil. Finding crude oil in the North to supplement or replace crude oil from the Niger Delta seems to be his definition of economic diversification.

Truth be told, President Buhari is not the first member of the northern establishment to be fanatical about finding oil in the North. He is just the only one who seems to understand it as economic diversification. He also appears to be the most fanatical about saying to those constantly taunting him in the Niger Delta: “ntor! I now have my own oil!”

While it is true that every geopolitical region in Nigeria, every faith, every ethnic nationality, has contributed to the membership of the philistine and satanic comprador elite united by and around oil and corruption, only the northern component of this evil national class has repeatedly borne the insult of being stereotyped as parasites and leeches feathering their own nest with other people’s resources.

In essence, although there are Yoruba and Igbo elite thieves (and thieves from other ethnic nationalities) who have spent the past forty years gorging on oil and destroying Nigeria and the Niger Delta in the process, only the Hausa-Fulani oil thieves have been branded in our national imaginary as parasites and leeches.

This has a lot to do with their long stranglehold on Federal power and their allergy to fiscal federalism. Any policy, any vision, any strategy that would wean the North of dependency on oil has been taboo for generations of northern leadership. There have also been northern loudmouths in our postcolonial history who, wittingly or unwittingly, have made a name for themselves brandishing their manifest destiny to be lord and masters of the oil.

The constant allegations of parasitism is what has haunted the psychology of the northern elite throughout much of Nigeria’s postcolonial history. However, their reaction to this history of jeers and taunts has always been a maniacal and wrong-headed desire to find their own oil at all costs, at any cost, or to bring the oil closer home.

Read more at: http://www.jalupon.com/ntor-as-economic-diversification/