Project Nigeria: Building the country of our dreams
I first muted the idea to write a book to promote Nigeria's economic development in the third quarter of 2016 when Nigeria slid into an avoidable recession. Rather than accept responsibility for it, the government of the day decided to trade blames by pushing the responsibility to the previous administration and make excuses based on the falling oil prices.
While in truth the administration inherited an economy which was on the decline due mostly to the fall in oil prices, a lot could have been done to mitigate against the imminent recession at that time but sadly nothing was done. This got me giving a lot of thoughts to our economy and i began to come up with a lot of innovative ideas which i believed if well implemented would turn around the economy of the country.
However, i did not put together my thoughts and start writing the book till 2018 when as part of a team working towards presenting Donald Duke as a presidential candidate in the 2019 elections i offered to write the economic plan for the Donald Duke Campaign Organization.
With that, i set to work by having a series of interviews with Donald Duke to capture his vision for the country's economy and went on further to carry out extensive research to gather data and details of the country's economic history as a foundation for the book. I was then able to flesh it up and infuse my ideas of economic growth to produce the finished document.
Sadly as fate will have it, the Donald Duke presidential bid was sabotaged along the line and the purpose of the book as a campaign document became irrelevant. It was left on my hard drive gathering dust for about a year when i was encouraged by a friend to still publish it as the contents still remained very relevant given the pathetic state of our economy and lack of direction of the current administration.
So in December last year, i revisited the document, edited it and watered it down from being a campaign document to be a general interest book with a few updates to make it up to date. I then got my good friend Samuel O. Ajayi to edit it to make it more reader friendly. Donald Duke also kindly obliged to write the Foreword for the book and the result is what we have today.
The take away from all this is that we all have a role to play in contributing towards the development of our country and we don't have to wait to be in a position of authority to make a difference. With this book, i have attempted to make a difference and it is my hope that it will go a long way in impacting the economic development of the country. I invite you all to join me as we strive to build the country of our dreams.
PS: In the weeks ahead i will be sharing a synopsis of each chapter of the book online to further intimate my readers with my thinking on the Nigerian Project.