This is a rejoinder to the thread, "Nigeria exports religion, India exports cars". The purpose of this rejoinder is to correct some misinformation and create an intellectual platform for Nigerians to truly understand the core challenges we face and develop solutions to them. People like the @op who put up the initial article are lacking in social research and analysis! They postulate an "either religion or development" concept that is very flat and hollow. Why? Because it assumes or infers the following:

1. That countries who prosper and develop do so because they reject religion or because they have no religion.
2. That religion is adverse to development
3. That religion rejects development
4. That Nigerians are bad because they are religious

These are all false assumptions and they continuously make people professional critics instead of problem solvers. It also tells me that most Nigerians do not understand the problem and fundamental dynamics of the Nigerian society. I have explained many times the concept of causes and effects. Many of the reasons people put forward as the causes of Nigeria's problems are actually effects, not causes. But many like the @op are too lazy to research and understand what the actual fundamental causes are.

Religion is not really something that is imported or exported. It is an ingrained part of every human. If you take a new born baby and leave him on an island among wild animals to grow up, when he comes of age, he will create a religion for himself. It is that basic.

Nigeria's problem is that we really have not gone through the basics of social development that most of the world went through. Europe, for example have experienced over 2000 years of social development. They have risen and fallen during these period and learned so much in the process. Asia have had their own phase too. Africa, south of the Sahara, have not really had that. Even over the last century, we have attempted to make a leap from bushmen(pardon the pun) straight into the information age, bypassing as it were, the industrial age! That is why we are struggling so much. Understand that this is both psychologically and physically. There is both a physical and psychological growth process a society goes through when it goes from poster service to steam cars to trains to pinhole cameras to wired phones and so on. We did not experience the industrial age. We did not go through any form of socio cultural renaissance. We didn't have any form of academic institutions that grew or promoted basic ideologies, research or concepts of civilization.

What we are doing now is really learning on the job because in reality, we have already lost that opportunity. We now have to work twice as much to catch up. Unfortunately, we also have a barrage of other vices that are mitigating against us. Primary amongst them is multiplicity of societies. Notice I didn't say multiplicity of languages. It is way more complex than that. South Africa has a multiplicity of languages but not necessarily a multiplicity of societies and social systems. Ghana is another example.

It is pertinent that Nigerians understand the real challenges of Nigeria, not just as a geographical entity, but as a social cultural mismatch!