Nigeria's Oil and Gas Sector: Between New Realities and Opportunities

Olusesan

Oil and Gas are Nigeria’s economic cash cows. The commodities account for about 80% of Nigeria’s external earnings and form a substantial 60-70% of her Gross Domestic Product, GDP. The huge deposit of these resources in the bosom of Nigeria’s soil and the nation near monolithic exploration of oil and gas for economic growth and sustainability, have crooned Nigeria’s economy has an oil-dependent.

Besides her size and projected population explosion of 200 million people in the next two decades; Nigeria is an irresistible global bride because of the huge deposits of oil and gas resources covered by her earth and the essentiality of oil and gas in the global economic marketplace. This essentiality and the quest to rule the world from resources accruable from oil and gas explain the various scales of crises on the global space, especially in the Middle-Eastern nations. The brewing crisis on the Bakassi Peninsular is also metaphoric of what nations can do for the black gold. 

Shall We Now Not beg for our lives? (2)

By: Olusesan Ogunyooye (@sesansoulmate)

I struggle each day to agree that this nation is a not failed state. I hate to think our democracy is “A Clueless Government; run by Boko Haram, for the poor people”. I sorrow at the thought that Nigeria; the ‘giant’ of Africa, now appears big for nothing in global perspective. I cannot but agree that life in this country is now brutish, nasty and short; and the only hope is Ola Rotimi’s “Hope of the Living Dead”? 

Yoruba says; “if your mother’s concubine is powerful than your father, you must call him daddy”. This is the ugly reality in Nigeria today. If Boko Haram is bigger, powerful and more ambitious than our government; then, shall we now not beg for our lives?

Today, Nigerians are like the proverbial monkey who strives not to be shamed; and once we are disgraced; we should strive not to die. If we strive not to be shamed as a people, and Boko Haram has made us dance naked in the market: shall we now beg not to die?

For me, all hopes that this government will save us are lost, all their options are exhausted and the government is ran, de facto, from the jungles of the northern states. If you think I’m cynical, have you heard the president speak lately? Did you hear him resolve to Psalm 91 as the panacea out of this national harvest of death? I am not against prayers, but I know even King David, the Psalmist, did not write Psalm 91 as a miraculous wand of protection.