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Editor, Itedge, Segun Oruame.

Why are we so unblessed?

I was standing in the midst of this crowd. The only questions they seem to have all centred on one thing: If my country really stands integrity on its head. Even a Pakistani wanted to know if we had any chance of cleaning up our acts and getting certified by the international community before our messianic president ended his last term. There I was inside UAE’s showcase of its idea of an international city. The place is Dubai.

Dubai never stops to arouse interest in me. My very first time here over a year ago, I thoroughly enjoyed the night rides, the never closing shops, the great multitude of shoppers. All different faces, all different races and all never bumping into themselves, all aware of themselves and all appearing not to notice that within a circle of five metres, you could have all the races clustered together shopping or waiting for the taxi.

There is something poignantly poetic about Dubai. The architectural masterpieces that reflect an ambitious attempt to make buildings make man breathless. These all enthral me: the tall skyscrapers standing majestically atop the desert sands; the well laid roads with no potholes, the traffic lights and the magnificent shopping malls, the street lights shinning in the night and appearing, particularly when you are near the seaside at nights like the long twining arms of a courtesan there to caress you to supreme sleep.

This city and all its majesty was built on the same resource for which Black Africa’s most populous country has become notoriously famous: crude oil. Inside Dubai is the Internet City, some futuristic setting to allow for a peep into how information technology would ultimately run the way things are done in this oil rich kingdom where there are more foreigners than indigenes.

The designers of modern Dubai wanted a city that would be cosmopolitan, grandiose in outlook, a sort of racial melting point where members of the global society would gather for commerce. They put the policies in place, build their city, open the ports, make entry less restrictive for everyone and then invested massively on infrastructures. The result is a city or cities within the UAE that serve as commercial hubs for countries and cities outside of the UAE particularly those within Africa.

Thousands of traders daily travel to Dubai from Lagos to purchase goods that would be sold here. There are several IT companies doing brisk business in Nigeria whose hub is Dubai. There is accurate figure for the volume of import from Dubai into Nigeria. But a rough estimate would simply show that the size of import is substantial enough to impact on our external/internal trade balance.

How did Dubai come about? It simply took the efforts and commitment of the leaders to want to get things right and also do the right thing. Not for them the gnome of corruption that has ruined all the great dreams for Nigeria. In stead of grandiose talks that end up dead on campaign grounds, the leadership in UAE has been able to translate simple talks and great ideas into masterpieces that adorn the city. Everywhere you turn, you see the power of good leadership and feel the evil of mismanagement in Nigeria.

As I stood this bright morning inside IT Edge stand at Gitex attending to the visitors, one question kept recurring in my mind: how did the generation gone and still up there end up frittering away so many great plans? How did they turn a god dream to a nightmare? An English gentleman who had never been to Africa before except Egypt wanted to know: “How come Nigerians are so bestially corrupt?” Since he left his native England 10 years ago, he had worked in Germany, Japan, India, and now China.

He had never heard anything good about Nigeria except that it is a country of lots of oil. He has seen the reports of hostage taking in the oily creeks. He has volume of reports on our (in) famous corruption. He has dozens of newspapers clips of cases of 419 involving Nigerians. I had a feeling he was wondering how we ended up having a stand at the 3rd largest ICT show on earth.

If Nigeria is a failed state, Dubai heightened that sense of failure. Everything we could have become and even better still is what Dubai has turned out to be. Unlike Nigeria with the critical manpower, the UAE has to import million of expatriates to build and sustain its dream. Almost 90% of the people here are regarded as expatriates. Without them, Dubai would simply die. What the leadership has provided is simply that primal sense of direction.

In spite of all our oil wealth, abundant human resources, and in the face of other bounties of nature, we have ended up in a messy ditch where moving forward appear to be an impossible task. Port Harcourt, Lagos, Warri and the other so-called big cities could have been another Dubai but those potentials were killed by the misadventure of leadership. A corrupt and inept leadership that has been fostered on the Nigerian state for well over four decades has ensured that state has been no better than a grandiose septic cistern.

Dubai exposes the deceits of leadership in Nigeria: Why the gaols must be home for thousands who have occupied leadership positions and criminally appropriated the common wealth to become theirs in private bank accounts abroad; why fugitive ex political office holders must be brought back in chains; why those who got power by coups must be made to account for their sudden wealth and brought to book; why cleaning the Nigerian state is a task that must be done.

Above all, it exposes why the talk about an ICT revolution would never work in an isolated context because there would never have been an Internet City in Dubai without a country and a city that works.

If anyone has doubt about supporting Ribadu and his EFCC team, let him follow me back to Dubai and stand with me that early morning inside the IT Edge stand to feel the sense of shame and despair of a Nigerian reined in by very honest questions of an international audience seeking to know why we have failed. Or put it less mildly: why we are a country of criminals?

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