Kaduna state governor, Nasir el-Rufai says he wishes that
Nigeria's oil reserves will dry up so that we can begin to apply our brains to
explore other avenues for revenue generation. The governor said this when he
spoke at the 2017 town hall meeting/founder’s day celebration in memory of
Ojetunji Aboyade, a renowned economist, in Ibadan, Oyo state yesterday
September 9th.
“Because
Nigeria gets easy money from oil, the nation has lost its thinking initiative
on how to develop other sources of revenue and diversify the economy. We
get easy money, we do not collect taxes and our taxes are six per cent of Gross
Domestic Product; that is an average of 21per cent. We stop respecting the
intellectuals that we have in our universities because we get easy money. This
is very sad. I wish the oil will dry up so that we can begin to use our brains
because we have stopped using our brains and we have stopped respecting
intellects because of easy money.”
Speaking
further, the governor said the earlier the oil dries up, the better it would be
for us as a Nation.
“How can
we promote a national subscription to meritocracy? How can we ensure that the
imperative of reflecting federal character does not become the enemy of merit
and quality of appointments? Today, we don’t plan. We don’t have national plan
and if we don’t plan, we are planning to fail. Having suffered brain
drain, how do we attract back our Diaspora and the brain-gain associated with
it like the Chinese and Indians have witnessed? These are the questions a
distributive mentality around easy oil revenues is dodging. The earlier
the oil dries up the better for our national ability to think, be innovative
and respect intellect and academic achievement.”
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