President Bola Tinubu.
By Lawrence Egede
I read a very old ancient newspaper that was called the Nigerian Pilot, being published then by Nnamdi Azikiwe at the Gold Coast, presently known as Ghana.
It reported that the first Republic federal Commissioner for Finance, Festus Okotiebo, borrowed the sum of twenty million British pounds sterling (£20,000,000) as a start-up industrial development fund for the Nigerian economy.
One can imagine the sum of money that can foot the bills of a project plan of an industrial development then, to compare with the present poor state of money value in Nigeria, but that is history.
It was at the inception of the Independence in 1960 and the republic in 1963 that the first Westminster regime started in Nigeria from the administration of the colonial taskmasters beforehand.
Only God knows if the debt was serviced before the civil war started in May 1967 and ended in Jan. 1970. I also learnt that the civil war was executed, through mortgaging Nigeria's economy with the Oil as a debt servicing Collateral.
We should be reminded that the execution of the civil war was taken over by the British government and her Allies.
We should be reminded also that the Amalgamation of the nation was in 1914, by the same British authorities.
This was for the fact that they had the UAC which made Nigeria their business colony, with the marriage ring of the global premier big businesses.
All premier businesses must have the signature of Queen Elizabeth the Second, while all the monies will bear the name of the Queen in their industrial colonies of trade.
So, the Nigerian economy has been tied to the left and right, the front and back, and the roundabout apron strings of the British authorities for a long time.
Let's visit what happened after the Civil War. Gradually, Nigeria fell victim to home economic dictates of the British on forex markets, with hawks' eye monitoring.
The British pound sterling value was dictating the pace until Nigeria decimalized her currency in 1973. Another thing was that General Yakubu Gowon executed the plan for the indigenization of Nigerian businesses authoritatively across the board.
That was when the actual last straw that broke the Camel's back pricked the hearts of all the foreign business owners in Nigeria.
They used grand styles and transferred their businesses to Nigerians, who conspired with them and started some gradual soft killings of the economy and money value.
The value of the Naira started to fall in 1985, and by 1993, when the military took an IMF draconian loan, the economy collapsed and shortly died.
The economy collapsed and shortly died without remedy, with all the injuries inflicted on the body for a long time.
What we are seeing today is a repercussion of what started gradually and softly in the past.
It will remain extremely difficult for someone to get up overnight in a twinkle of an eye and think that he can revive the economy in a jiffy by simply destroying it to an irredeemable standard.
Today, the young generation who did not know the exact history can now count their monies in millions and billions, without having any feeling that something bad had affected the economy.
They didn't know that there was a time when only 16 Kobo bought one dollar. They didn't know that there was a time when one naira bought one British pound sterling.
They didn't know that there was a time when a brand new Peugeot car sold for only five thousand naira.
I bought my own Peugeot car brand new in January 1984, at the cost of fourteen thousand, three hundred naira only off the shelf.
They didn't know that there was a time when motorcycles sold at between seven and twenty-five naira only, depending on the brands.
But now where are we? And people think the economy and the Naira that had died in value and in purchasing power without remedy long ago, can be resurrected by any living mortal in Nigeria.
We are doomed for now that corruption has added empty virtues, to the predicament of naira value dwindling daily and never can be amended.
That's why the caption of this topic queried the possibility of reviving an old-time-damaged economy within a short period when it is impossible to do so.
Most of the people who assumed power in Nigeria love money but don't know how to manage the nation's economy. They must rethink.
Those people who have been in power when the goings were fair should eschew their love for money and go back to the British authorities, begging them to return the key to a new economic revival and help the nation's economy breathe again.
