Why Not A Ruga Settlement On the Moon And Other Matters Arising..

A leader's reach must exceed his grasp, for all else of any fruitful goal is built from this...

-The Noir Mentalist
The national quandary of establishing Ruga Settlements across Nigeria's 36 states by the President Muhammedu Buhari Adminstration has been the subject matter at the talking points by many compatroits. The nagging issue betrays logic, skews the equitable distribution of our national resources, excerbates the strategic curbing of numbing insecurity and is damned to sure uncover a new collision course for the Fulani and over 200 ethnic nationalities that comprise Africa's most populated country. A most elaborate article which deconstructs the intriguing legal, sociopolitical and economic viewpoints and other matters arising from the Ruga Settlements or Cattle Colony as a black hole in the anals of Nigeria's policy decision making is credited to a sagely personality called Nnamdi Elekwachi. It has gone viral on WhatsApp and other social media platforms and you should read it. It is cerebrally well put together. Headlines across the Nigeria media unearthed a back and forth bickering of who has been given the responsibility to oversee the setting up of these Ruga Settlements. Miyetti Allah says Professor Osinbajo's office is in charge and possibly since he heads the economic office of the country. But then the VP, Prof. Osinbajo has come out to deny any such delegation of duty. So does the responsibility fall on the Ministry of Agriculture? Prof. Osinbajo has just returned from being told very hard truths from CIA briefs handed to the Vice President of the US, Mike Pence, after he committed towering debaucheries about so many troubling instability and poverty related issues including kidnappings transpiring in Nigeria since his and PMB's ascendancy to power in 2015. It is tiresome that at a time the industrialised world is working to ensure man conquers space, why can't PMB rather aspire to place a Ruga Settlement on the lunar surface. It would make global history having Ruga Astronauts. Is that an unattainable moonshot to him and his cabinet? Space entrepreneurs as Bas Lansdorp, my friend, the CEO/Co-founder of the Mars One Project and institutions as NASA, CNSA are working to colonise the Moon and Mars from 2024 to advance our human civilisation and species in the event of a global catastrophe. India, Israel and China besides the US and Russia all have hitech robotic equipment and satellites in deep space capturing information and on Mars mapping for it's ability to sustain life. This expeditions mean that man is about to live permanently on a second planet and therefore become a two planet species. Awesome isn't it?

Furthermore when this matter of cattle colony and food chain discussion is X-rayed through the prism of sustainability as all goals are in this age of bigdata evidenced industrial revolution, it is clear that "meat production" has lost its impetus. Research findings clearly show that livestock farming in it's entire value chain inclusive of ranching, abbatoir processing etc. to produce meat for human consumption has such a huge dangerous carbon footprint, which creates imbalances for the wellbeing of our environment and species in the long-term. This has led to other avenues being sought to substitute for our protein diets and intake. In the last few years innovation driven food technologists have declared that eating naturally harvested and organically processed insects is the most likely way to go. American startups already have exotic healthy, tasty and nutritious insect burgers and cuisines on their menus. These range of food and culinary offerings are getting angle investments from series A to B and further funding to mainstream these futurist way of dining and living healthy. Afterall we Africans and many other cultures eat insects too from over several millennia, don't we? Why is our country's leadership so out of touch with these scientific facts? And it's because they don't read. Why can't we find new innovative ways to curb conflict, especially those arising from matters as mundane as livestock rearing for which so many lives continue to be lost daily?

Nigeria under PMB is a signatory to the Paris Agreement so it is therefore worth questioning executive decisions to waste such huge resources seeking for oil finds in the various basins across Nigeria where it is clear they will not be found? The Feudalist on horseback economics of this adminstration has continued to yield diminishing returns and is a cause for alarm. The anthropologist Joseph A. Tainter analysed input-output flows and the complexity theory to intellectually facilitate how money which is a store of value can also be referenced as stored energy. Just as the sun and the human brain are store houses of energy. Though the sun is vastly far larger than the brain. When the applying Eric. J. Chaisson's an astrophysicist's standard unit to the above comparative it turns out that the brain uses 75,000 times more energy as the sun. The question is where is all this brain power in the context of Nigeria's leadership when needed to solve the most important questions of our national advancement at this time in our fragile history as a people? The unforced errors of resources management under the current administration are dangerous when subjected to the interrogations of rationality. In Tainter's most remarkable work, "The Collapse of Complex Societies", he analyses the collapse of twenty-seven separate civilisations over a 4,500 year span, from barely known civilisations as the Kachin of Burma's highlands to the more known ancient Egyptians and Roman Empire. Tainter details an enormous range of possible factors about collapse and such issues clearly plague Nigeria in huge disproportion today. These are inclusive of resource depletion, natural disaster, invasions, economic distress, social dysfunction, religion and bureaucratic incompetence. If Nigeria were a distinct civilisation in itself, it would collapse any time soon given the rapacious forces at play especially from it's rent seeking elite and diminishing returns driven governance structure. Based on how Nigeria runs today from increased exponential inputs of multiple taxation of it's citizens, our civilisation as a country shows governments decline per unit of input when measured in terms of public goods and services provided. One of the best measures of the rent seeking relationship and corruptocracy at play under the PMB adminstration as concerns the elites and citizens in our stagnating economy is found in Nigeria's position in respect of the Gini coefficient. Gini coefficient is a measure of the income inequality, a higher coefficient means greater income inequality. This also facilitates the understanding of how Nigeria has become the poverty headquarters of the world since June 26, 2018 according to the UN and World Poverty Clock when we over took India. I will call your memory to the recent caustic whiplash by Prof. Sagay delivered to Senator Lawan who perjured in the global public square about his salary being seven hundred and fifty thousand naira (N750,000) instead of fifteen million naira (15,000,000) monthly. The Nigerian moral compass is so broken we are walking around in circles seeking a nationhood that remains futile from all standpoints including economic and fiscal. Our leaders lie brazenly and amongst the elite and poor we have many abetting these insanities. The recent announcement by the Nigerian Central Bank Czar Mr. Emefiele who just got his second term in office, that he is going to recapitalise the commercial banks is a singsong that bears no fruit for the ordinary Nigerian who works so hard to fight off the poverty chevron forcefully pinned on his or her shoulder daily by a government and failed institutions that are sterile and animated at best. Except there is a serious impact investment in entreprenuership nothing will change for certain. The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978, signed by President Jimmy Carter, added management of unemployment to the Federal Reserve's (The Fed's) mandate. The US Federal Reserve System is the most powerful central bank in history and the force of dorminance in the US economy today from it's creation in 1913. The Nigeria 9th Senate must work to ensure unemployment hurdles are a key mandate of the CBN, when considering legislative amendments to pursue. It is not known what policy philosophy Mr. Emefiele operates, be it Keynesianism, Monetarism etc. and all the actions in monetary deployment under his watch are rather those grasping at straws in the dark for a Nigerian populace that needs huge interventionary schemes to stimulate the economy to come alive and fast too. Rather all Emefiele seems to be bothered about is defending the naira. A lost cause in the currency war three (CWIII) battle on the front lines of the hugely competitive and dog eat dog global financial system. ECOWAS just announced recently the coming of the ECO currency by January 2020, that's a new money frontier for the West Africa subregion. To add to Nigeria's lag in economic fortune PMB has not made Nigeria a signatory to the African free trade agreement already signed by several other Africa nations and already in force. PMB says there is a need to protect Nigeria from certain critical imbalances in the agreement. It beats most watchers and me why this cannot be resolved most expediently so as to get our economic fortunes on track.

AGGREYBUTTONS Network in it's entrepreneurial tracker research unearthed the palpable decline in youth entrepreneurs to take advantage of the available ICT opportunities at their disposal and offered by global firms as Google, Microsoft et al preferring rather to apply themselves to online fraud and illegitimate schemes. AGGREYBUTTONS in a soon to be released article is calling for stakeholders in the Nigeria economy to work to shift this dreadful trend which has continued to plague the Nigerian business brand and engagement with international investors and prospective partners.

Another crucial debacle and talking point is the one borne out of the last elections held in Nigeria. The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC has made several false and presdigitatory statements about it's server infrastructure which was budgeted for, bought, installed and underwent beta operational deployment in earlier elections. The case of electoral fraud has been ongoing at the tribunal and INEC has made a series of unfounded public statements that has compromised it's integrity and questions the competence and intent of it's principal officer, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu. He has been asked to resign forthwith as published in a piece in the Vanguard by Femi Aribisala. Robert K. Merton's most famous contribution was the formalization of the idea of the self-filling prophesy. It underscores that a statement given as true, even if initially false, can become true if the statement itself changes behavior in such a way as to validate the false premise. This is the case in point with INEC's shapeshifting litany of lies and more lies. In comparing scenarios, it remains historically notable that citizens of Sierra Leone went to the polls on March 7, 2018 to show the world Africans can undertake global firsts. The country recorded votes at 70% of the polling units using blockchain technology. This was the first of its kind in actual practice and the methodology was created by Leonardo Gammar of Agora. The Bigdata of votes was anonymously stored in an immutable ledger, thereby offering instant access to the election results without any hitch. It is repugnantly sad that Nigeria, the so called giant of Africa and BigBrother cannot do better than Sierra Leone and Prof. Yakubu has been called out as a thorough disgrace to academic institutionalism and every firmament of openness, fairness and equity. Nigeria once again has showcased a total failure of ICT and technological progressionism. Our leadership and institutions continue to rape us of much needed uprightness and our common patrimony as a nation which can be likened to the now brewing Pastor Fatoyinbo debacle at COZA in which pentecostal christiandom has taken molestation of it's discipleship to new despicable heights. In hindsight Nigeria has lost costly infrastructure as a satellite, sea going vessels so it makes sense that it can lose a server, after all.....it is only a server? Except it is time we ripped Nigeria from this event horizon of shame and global reproach.

At a time we should be fighting corruption according to PMB and the APC, the gradually embedding culture of disinformation, fake news and propaganda at it's most absurd is on the rise, deployed by our pillars of nationhood. Institutions like INEC, government and security agencies are reinforcing it. The defuncted Cambridge Analytica, the misinformation military contractor and Facebook need a whole new understanding of what constitutes the rules of engagement in deploying dangerously skewed news within the public space. In a letter to President Jonathan in 2014 I warned about the implications of these and that Nigeria was open to attacks and manipulation by foreign actors. When disinformation is brought within the context and application of the complexity theory - reality distortion, inclusive of stripping the past, present and future of it's tangible substance is a clear and present danger.

Global warming and Climate Change are empirical realities which are unleashing environmental devastation on nations across the world and in Nigeria. Mitigation responses backed by technology are key to arresting this situation. And the Electric car debate in Nigeria, is a matter that should be of concern to many Nigerians as the 8th Senate failed to consider and impose a timeline to ban gasoline powered cars and introduce solar/electric cars into our country. A bill at the last senate sponsored by former Senator Ben Murray Bruce on this matter was refused support. The last Senate was rather bothered we keep exploring and exploiting Oil which is already a near dead energy resource like coal. It will also further compound the debilitating environmental issues on hand. The world is totally going renewable, Europe, America, South America and Asia have all set dates to phase out carbon powered cars and Nigeria is as ever destined to be a dumping ground for the beloved tokunbo cars. A Greek gift from technological evolution and a poison chalice Nigeria will gladly accept. The Nigeria Solar Eagles National and Heureka Ent. Limited a thinktank, technology and energy consultant calls on the new Senate President in the person of Senator Lawan to use his good office to visit this most important policy direction to preserve our nation's environmental carrying capacity which is on life support. We also call on the PMB Administration to do the same and invest in indigenous R&D in this sector which is in line with the country's automotive policy. Note that our forests and indigenous landscapes which help carbon capture are continuously being depleted given the cloak of poverty on Nigerians based on their increasing daily energy needs and scavenge of valuable natural resources for their subsistence.

Conclusively, borrowing from China a world power today, Nigeria cannot continue on the path of violence, terrorism, rape and insecurity. The study of Chinese history is one of periodic collapse for 140 tough and tumultuous years from 1839 to 1979. It began with the Opium Wars (1839-1860) through to the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the warlord and gangster period of the 1920s, as Nigeria is currently experiencing. Then China fell into the civil war between the nationalists and communinists in the early 1930s, Japanese invasion and World War II (1931-1945), the communist takeover in 1949, the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), death of Mao and consequent downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976. These were continuing episodes of civil war, external wars, famine, mass rape, terrorism, mass refugee migrations as Nigeria's IDP challenges today. In China then there were wide spread political executions, corruption, assassination and a total absence of an effective leadership at the centre and/or rule of law. Nigeria needs neuroleadership, frontier governance, an independent judiciary, education, entreprenuership, science and technology advancement. All these will ensure the fulfillment of her part in the quest for global peace, reduction of poverty cum inequality, stability, increased development goals while nurturing a competitively capable citizenry.