Pius Adesanmi: Do you know how to say Opportunity Cost in your language?

Patience Jonathan’s USD 31.4 million is of no use to anybody in a frozen account. Take that money and use it to pay the salaries of primary school teachers in Otuoke. Or you use it to fund pipe-borne water for Otuoke. Or you use it to renovate primary school classrooms in Otuoke. Or you use it to renovate primary health care facilities in Otuoke and stock them with subsidized basic drugs.Fayose’s Dasuki loot is of no use in the account frozen by the EFCC. Take that money to the remotest villages in Ekiti and repeat the Otuoke scenario above.

Then, in 2019, when we begin the degoatification of today’s officially protected persons (OPPs) such as Abba Kyari, Mamman Daura, Dambazzau, Buratai et al, whatever we find in their accounts, you take it to their villages and repeat the Otuoke and Ekiti scenarios.

Whatever is found in the accounts of Fashola, Amaechi, Ngige, etc after 2019 should undergo the same treatment in their villages.

The people will learn lessons from such a process. They will have concrete evidence of the concept of opportunity cost: when we support “our son” and “our daughter” now because of the N5000 or the amala or the ponmo they donate to us, this hospital, this school, this water project, etc, is what we are giving up.

Human psychology is very funny. If you do not give the people a concrete illustration of what they are missing in terms of the long-term prospects of the quality of their lives just by hiding behind ethnicity, religion, and political divisions to support crooks who offer them temporary and immediate gratification, you will never achieve the attitudinal shift necessary for societal rebirth.

Generalized poverty and the long absence of civics provide a winning formula for the crook who offers the people immediate gratification. And that is the dominant paradigm of Nigerian society. These two dynamics, poverty and the lack of civics, are the graveyard of the most visionary ideas for the salvation of Nigeria.

Consider my case. I’m a realist. I am not under any illusion. I understand perfectly that all these things I am doing and saying, all the attitudinal and paradigm shift I am working to attain in Okun land, all it takes is for a crook like Dino Melaye to steal billions and sprinkle a few thousands around in Okun land and he will always defeat my ideals. Five minutes of distributing N1000 in the nooks and crannies of Okun land and Dino will always defeat any scale of envisioning I do and the time I put into the vision.

To defeat the tragedy he represents for Okun land, I need to be able to help the people concretely visualize the difference the billions he is stealing could make in their lives.

Spend that USD 31.4 million on the people of Otuoke and help them see what they cannot see. Until we find a way to break down, banalize, and concretely illustrate the concept of opportunity cost for our people, it will continue to be possible for a state governor to steal from them and use a fragment of his loot to buy coffins for them as the idiot Governor of Katsina state recently did.

Until we find a way of making the concept of opportunity cost imaginable in our languages, it will continue to be possible for the oppressor to blow a whistle, line up the people behind ethnic, religious, and political lines, and set them on one another.

NB: Remember to invite Mama Peace to commission any project you fund in Otuoke with her USD 31.4 million.


Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Pius Adesanmi, a professor of English, is Director of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada.

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