Political Reflections with Esema Aguse. Sustainable Development

Everywhere you turn, the convergence on where lies our economic salvation is a hardly reasoned conclusion that the next big ones are Agriculture and Solid Minerals.

This is so anti-sustainable development, so wrong, in fact, so silly you can recognise a major problem in our national economic aspiration has been an unwillingness for deep an extensive  thinking by those whose primary responsibility is to do just that.  

First off, our biggest and most enduring economic problem is unemployment. And no nation has solved or even impacted unemployment by recourse to Agriculture and Solid Minerals.

In fact,  the greatest agriculture nation, US,  has just about 3% of its active population involved in it, far less than Nigeria. This suggests that if we plan a shift to Agriculture and go about it the way modernity compels, we may actually end up swelling the unemployed demography by taking already engaged farmers out of the land.

Two, those who chorus Agric and Solid Minerals seem not to read correctly  or to have taken to heart the indismissible an ugly issues of environment the  story of Nigeria's   60-year oil & gas business consistently tells. Mineral exploitation, whether it's liquid like petroleum or solid like Bauxite, leave similar footprints on the environment.

Three, the number of people involved in agriculture or solid minerals has nothing, interestingly evidential,  to do with a nation's capacity to lift a significant percent of its under-$1-a-day poor.

I think I can go on to four and five and six and seven on why Agriculture and Solid Minerals are the Broad Way and Brainpower, which I may have to expansiate in a fuller article, after appropriate authorisation from whom Intend to mention in it, is the Narrow Gate that leads to our economic heaven.

On sustainability, for instance, what happens if the prices of our agricultural produce and ores crash in the world market? Do we shift to selling the waters in the Niger and the Atlantic since it appears weak prices only drive us to the sense of 'What next of of our physical resources do we exploit or exhaust?'

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About TRENDY

Shift from the Memorization of Facts to the Understanding of Principles.
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