The Nation Newspaper

Category: Adebayo Lamikanra

  • Money, Money, Money

    Money, Money, Money

    It is not difficult to imagine that as man began to accumulate wealth and property, the need to devise a means of keeping track of one’s property became increasingly pressing. It was well and good to have fifty head of cattle but what were they worth? Maybe using cattle as an example in this case is not ideal because even now,  some peoples around the world measure their wealth in cattle and are doing very well. It is for this reason that in certain parts of Africa, bride price is paid in cattle. For example in Zimbabwe where the rate of inflatioin has climbed above 300%, enterprising people are setting up cow banks in which trading is in cows rather than the local currency which over the years has become a sick joke. As long as the cattle are properly looked after, they appreciate in value and because the investment appreciated through reproduction, a hedge against devaluation is built up over the years and since it can be a life long investment the appreciation over the years can become quite considerable making an investment in cattle rearing a worthwhile proposition. The next time you come across a herd of cattle unconcernedly and rather contentedly cropping grass  by the road side, or sadly on somebody’s farm,  what you are looking at is a bank on the hoof. The difficulty in investing in such a bank is the lack of transferability of such funds into other accounts to buy something as mundane as a newspaper as you can easily do with paper money.

    Money as we know it did not always exist. It had to be invented to enhance commerce, the movement of goods and services within and between communities. In the simplest form trade developed between neighbouring people who needed to satisfy their mutual needs by exchanging goods among themselves. For example people in riverine areas exchanged their fish for the agricultural produce of their neighbours who lived some distance away from any substantial body of water. Some other examples are a lot weightier than fish, yams and other products, because of their scarcity, assume the quality of currency. There was a time when salt was so precious that it was an important article of trade. It had a scarcity value that transcended it’s utility value and the people who had access to salt guarded this resource as jealously as they could because it was worth more than it’s weight in gold. The humble pepper was at one time a very important article of trade and served as currency in some parts of the world. As a matter of fact, the Europeans had, after their exposure to spices including pepper during their Crusader misadventures were so desperate for a reliable source for their fux that they sailed west in their quest to find a route to the spice fields of the East, mainly India. This need had arisen because their route to the Orient had been blocked by the Ottomans.They sailed west in order to get to India and came to the New World. Believing that they had arrived at their destination, they called the people they encountered, Indians! Not long after, the Spanish under the leadership of the Italian, Christopher Columbus landed in the New World. Vasco da Gama sailing under the Portuguese flag sailed all the way to India round the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa to correct the earlier error of sailing west in search of India. This ushered in the era of European exploitation of Africa, an era which has spread to the present. All because the Europeans were desperate to lay their hands on the spices of India. They went in search of spices but found gold all along the way striping every territory along the way of any gold that could be found under their sub-soil.

    Gold has been the most trusted repository of wealth in the world and in all probability it will always be. At the slightest hint of economic distress, there is a precipitous rush to acquire this precious metal if only as a hedge against damaging inflation. So great has been the lure of gold that it has been the reason for the greatest crimes against mankind throughout the history of the world. On the other hand, it has, in equal measure been the greatest spur to human development. For example, the greatest impetuous to American development was provided by the discovery of gold in California in 1849. This led to the development of the railway from the east coast to the West and later on the opening of the Panama canal which allowed ships to go through the isthmus of Panama rather than go through the perils awaiting them in the Straits of Magellan at the tip of South America. The story of gold cannot be complete without the mention of the effect of this metal on the peoples of South Africa since it’s discovery in the area of Johannesburg (City of gold) in 1886. All the crimes which the White people in that country have committed against Blacks from that time on has been caused by this discovery. All the development associated with South Africa has also been achieved on the back of this precious metal as well as it the diamonds mined in Kimberly.

    Ironically, gold is useless for all practical purposes except as a reserve commodity for storing wealth. Even for this purpose gold has not exercised this function since the Americans under the presidency of Richard Nixon took the USA off the gold standard. In other words, there is nothing holding up the dollar and as much of it can be printed as the controlling authorities decide but what this means is a continuous depression in the value of the dollar. The consequence of this for the global economy can only be imagined but it is all bad. It is for this reason that the global economy has not recovered fully from the effects of the crash of 2008 when the financial institutions responsible for the administration of global finance crashed spectacularly and governments had to bail them out. It does not look as if the world has learnt anything from that crash and is waiting for an inevitable repeat in the future which could be quite near.

    Gold has, more than any other metal with the possible exception of silver been associated with currency as far back as the dynasties that ruled Egypt so many centuries ago. Before and since then some rather exotic substances have been used as currency in many different parts of the world. Long before the coming of the Europeans to the Americas and their incessant and tireless foraging for gold, the indigenous peoples of that continent had used various things as currency. This is in spite of the abundance of gold and silver deep under their feet. Those precious metals were used for the manufacture of exquisite jewelry and other decorative items which dazzled the first Europeans who in any way had come so far away from home in search of Eldorado, the mythical city of gold. They did not find Eldorado but found gold which they straight away looted and carted off to Spain to strengthen their own currency.

    The Aztecs and Mayans who had built impressive, centrally administered political units in different parts of Central and South America used various things as currency in spite of their access to large quantities of gold. There was a time when in some parts of their continent feathers, admittedly, very beautiful feathers plucked from the quetzal bird was the repository of the wealth of the people.

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    Cocoa was so highly priced in that region that it was also used as currency. This commodity which later on became the source of both public and private wealth in certain parts of Nigeria (echoes of Cocoa House) was generated by the Mayans and the beans obtained from the fruit was considered as a gift to mankind from Quetzacoatl, the god of wisdom, making these seeds sacred. Only the best seeds were used as currency, and the smaller ones were consumed as a beverage or fermented into alcohol. Cocoa beans, in spite of several difficulties including the guarantee of supplies as well as perishability were used as currency in Mesoamerica for more than a millennium.

    At the time that the Spaniards were eviscerating the ancient empires of Mesoamerica, the Portuguese were doing the same thing in Africa. Those two European powers were extracting so much wealth from their respective areas of influence that, to reduce the possibility of conflict between them, the Pope, at that time, the de facto ruler of Western Europe divided the world into two halves and awarded the Americas to Spain whilst Africa was handed over to the Portuguese. The Spanish wasted no time in wasting the indigenes in their area of the New World and began to replace them with Africans captured mainly from the Portuguese half of the world. Since the Papal Bull of demarcation prevented the Spanish from operating in Africa, they issued contracts called the Asiento to other Europeans, notably the English, the Danes and the Dutch for the supply of African slaves to Spanish territories in the New World thereby imbuing African bodies with the property of currency since they could be used to purchase goods and services.

    The direct use of people as currency was not very convenient and so the slave trade led to the development of a special currency which was called the manilla. This was a horseshoe shaped trinket which was struck mainly in Britain, more specially Birmingham, Netherlands (Amsterdam) and Denmark. The different varieties of manillas which were used over several hundred years were struck from; copper, brass, an alloy of copper and zinc and bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Interestingly, recent studies have shown that the famous Benin bronzes were cast with manillas  struck in Germany and are actually composed of brass. Apparently, the manillas were melted by the Benin artists to produce those exquisite works of art for which Benin is even now, justly famous. For four hundred years manillas were exchanged for slaves in Africa and shipped under the most appalling conditions imaginable to the New World and into a short lifetime of unremitting toil and suffering. Their unpaid labour laid the foundation for the American economy which is now by far, the largest in the world. Apart from a few works of art which were looted anyway and carried of the Europe Africa got nothing, absolutely nothing from the the horrors of the slave trade.

    Manillas did not fade away at the end of the slave trade as the commodity traded just shifted from people to palm oil. The Europeans produced the mantillas used in trading with Africa and just as it was with the Roman dinar, the manilla lost weight steadily over five hundred years but surprisingly, it continued to be a widely used currency in many parts of West Africa until it was decommissioned by the British as recently as 1949.

  • Money-what we want

    Money-what we want

    I always thought that the song, Money (that’s what I want) was first recorded by the Beatles who after all had a lot of monster hits in the sixties, a period which has been described as the swinging sixties, a period which swung, sometimes with the violence of a revolution. The situation in the sixties led to profound changes to the world in so many diverse ways that a new world was formed and the Beatles collectively and as individuals played a large part in bringing this new world into being. Yes, they were partly responsible for the new sounds of popular music but they were not the authors of the music they played. The real sources being black musicians, notably Little Richard and Chuck Berry, who because they were black could not be given the recognition that their talent deserved at that time. It is therefore excusable for me to ascribe the authorship of Money to the Beatles rather than the team of Janie Bradford and  Berry Gordy,  founder of Tamla Records which later on became Tamla Motown, the first globally successful black owned record label. As this is not an article about popular music, I will move on from it in the hope that an article about popular music will follow in due course.

    This article is about money but it is good to start with the big song about money because it says a great deal about the subject. After the riveting opening riff, the singer informs us that ‘everything good in life is free but you can tell that to the birds and bees so, give me money, that’s what I want!’ Actually, the song would have lacked the punch which knocked everyone out at the time but for the fact that the desire for money was, is and would always be as all consuming as it is universal.

    Money exists both in the abstract and in the shocking reality as people spend as much if not more time thinking about money as in wondering what to do to make money, lots of money with which to execute any number of personal projects. For most people their thoughts hardly go beyond this point as they can only make enough money for the bare necessities of life; food, some form of shelter and the settlement of pressing family matters. These, the vast majority, especially in the so called developing countries including Nigeria live from hand to mouth, living a life that is circumscribed by their numerous wants. For such people there cannot be any brightness to lighten the gloom of their existence as they can only dream of what they can do with money if only they had some to spend.

    On the other side of the coin are those whose relationship with money goes beyond just thinking about it. They are the ones who can think of what to do with the money at their disposal. It matters little or nothing how they have come to have the money jingling in their pockets as long as those pockets are full. Indeed, the whole point of this exercise is to speculate about the ways and means of keeping those pockets full.

    At the mundane level of everyday spending of money, for most people, it is all about notes and coins which are exchanged for goods and services. These are as physical as the nose on your face. The pieces of printed paper we now use as money these days are value free as they are nothing more than promissory notes which cannot deliver on their promise to exchange them for a stated amount of gold as was the case until all governments of the world conspired against their citizens by refusing to back their currency with a stated weight of gold. Each note is only worth what it can buy in the market and as countries fall deeper and deeper into debt, the value of that promissory note in your pocket decreases everyday. In the presence of inevitable inflationary pressure, that value decreases until all that is left is a worthless piece of paper. As the loss of value is cranked up, the government speeds up the process of printing money and the normal business of buying and selling becomes well nigh impossible.

    History tells us, or at least those of us who care to listen, that no polity no matter how strong it is economically can survive any sustained inflationary pressure and the devaluation of its currency for any length of time and for some currencies, a terminal stage is lurking just around the next corner, especially when there are debts to liquidate. We can allow the current fate of the Naira  to wander into our minds at this point in time.

    In addition to a flag and a national anthem, every country has a currency associated with it. Except of course those Francophone countries in West Africa which suffer under the lash of some bastard currency associated with France. For all that, it has to be said that some currencies are more equal than others. Some currencies are actually worthless and not worth the paper they are printed on but even then, they are still very much in demand as in spite of their troubled state, they remain legal tender.

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    Talking about the value of currencies today, the American dollar is supreme and for those with problems about having money in their pocket, there is the secondary and massive problem of laying hands on the almighty dollar. A couple of hundred dollars in your pocket in certain parts of the world can lift you out of poverty, at least for a little while. The American dollar remains in the bracket of the almighty compared with any other currencies on earth. This is because the dollar is used for no less than 88% of all transactions in the global market place. For example, oil is priced and paid for in dollars and given the volume of oil traded everyday the oversized value attached to the dollar should simply be left to those with an overactive imagination. The fate of the dollar is important to all of us and for those that are genuinely rich, their wealth is quoted in those dollars. You have truly arrived on the global scene when you have a few million dollars to your name but in a world in which you have a few thousand dollar billionaires, the mere millionaire is in serious danger of being simply trampled under the well shod feet of those sitting on a pile of billions of dollars.

    For those with billions of dollars to their name, it is clear that they have solved the problem of how to make money which is what everybody wants but only a few can get. But the point has to be made that as dollar fortunes rise for some people, the amount of money at the disposal of other people dwindles in the same measure even though it might be extreme to say that the people at the tip of the money pyramid are simply sucking up the funds which the multitudes at the base of the pyramid need to make their lives halfway more meaningful. To put this in some form of perspective, the richest eighty-one individuals on earth hold onto themselves more wealth than half of the poorest people in the world. That is simply mind boggling but what is even more alarming is that the richest are daily becoming richer whilst the poor are sinking deeper into the deadly morass of impecuniosity or to put it more bluntly, extreme and degrading poverty. Whilst the very rich have the headache of what to do with their money, the poorest are wondering where their next meal is coming from. As it is with individuals, so it is with countries. The United States with less than five percent of global population consumes roughly 25% of global resources and is indebted to the tune of 33 trillion US dollars with the interest on this loan rising everyday. The debt owed to the rest of the world is growing because the US cannot generate the money needed to power her overblown economy through taxes and other fiscal means of raising money. This notwithstanding, the US continues to burn money on her extensive healthcare system which does not provide adequate cover to a large percentage of her citizens. As the baby boomers, those born in the ten year period after the end of World War II, the largest demographic group in the US leave the work force through retirement, the payment of social security to the elderly increases whilst their armed forces, flung over the world are eating up a substantial portion of available funds.

    The largest economy in the world is deep in debt and this must have a deleterious effect on global economy. This is bound to have an effect on the amount of money which will be found in pockets all around the world. What happens to the Dollar is the business of the rest of the world as this determines the value of whatever money you have in your pocket. The fate of the Roman currency, the dinar which was the arbitrating currency of the Roman empire some two thousand years ago is instructive in this regard.

    The dinar was a coin which we are told contained two grams of silver when it was first struck. Over the years as silver became progressively scarce, the weight of silver in the coin became less in the same manner, in the same way that paper currencies lose their value as governments print more money to cover up the loss of weight (value) of paper money. As time went on the dinar contained very little or no silver and the people needed a load of worthless dinar just to buy food to eat. Eventually, the empire, the mighty Roman empire could no longer deal with the inflationary pressure bearing down on it and this, as much, if not more than the Germanic tribes which sacked Rome was responsible for the collapse of the Roman empire in the west. It is therefore not idle to speculate that problems associated with the value of the dollar will not end well for the rest of us. After all, all that the Americans need do is print more dollars to take care of at least part of their humongous debt. This is easy to do since the dollar no longer comes with the promise of a gold backing and like the dinar before it, it is shedding weight. Our local predicament with the value, or rather, the lack of it, of the Naira is in spite of the fact that what we are up against is a depreciating dollar. The dollar has lost no less than 65% of its value since 1985 and yet you need more than 1,000 Naira to buy one miserable dollar today. This means that the dollar you buy today is a whole lot less valuable than the dollar as it was at the time we entered the dollar trap with the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) as prescribed by our creditors, the IMF and the World Bank. The Nigerian government of the day decided to get into bed with those terrible twins against the expressed wishes of the good people of Nigeria. The same people who are now suffering from the product of our unholy romance with the mythical market forces which we were told would put us on the path to prosperity.

  • The curse

    The curse

    It is difficult to believe that human civilisation does not go back much more than ten thousand years ago. But that bald statement is true. And yet our earth has been spinning on its axis and moving around our sun for more than four billion years now.  Indeed, only fifty million years ago, there was not a trace of the creatures which evolved to give rise to our species. We should be humbled by the fact for example that some species such as crocodiles and turtles with which we inhabit the earth have been around for millions of years when we can only measure our years in a few hundred thousand years. True, we have traced our earliest hominid ancestors to a little over three million years ago, our evolutionary journey did not bring us to the glorious present until around three hundred thousand years ago when man having acquired enough brain power to become human, was let loose upon a totally unsuspecting earth. We have given the name Homo sapiens (wise man) to our species to separate us from all the hominids which came before us and to show that our species is endowed with wisdom. How wise we really are is however still open to speculation.

    The newly minted man took his place alongside millions of other plants and animals species. By this time he had  worked his way up the food chain to sit on top of it. Since then, he has displayed a dominance the quality of  which has not been seen anywhere on earth since the days of the largest dinosaurs more than fifty million years ago.

    The dinosaurs dominated the earth with their sheer bulk, the most dominant of them like T. Rex tipping the scale at several tons. Man, new rulers of the earth, were in comparison puny creatures not more than sixty kilogrammes in weight but with a brain many times the size of what passed for a brain which, for want of a better word, powered the various activities of the dinosaurs. Unlike other species, mankind added the power of thought to all his natural instincts and began a career of anthropogenic activities with which he created a new world. But, this did not happen spontaneously as it took no less than three hundred thousand years for man to learn how to make the earth fruitful enough to satisfy mankind’s basic requirements for food and shelter.

    It was the fortuitous discovery of agriculture that made the phenomenon which has been described as the ascent of man possible. Before mankind learnt to till the soil profitably, he had to struggle against the natural elements in order to wring a precarious existence out of the many bounties of nature. All his energies were devoted to wringing out food from his environment, one which he shared with other species some of which were better adapted to the prevailing circumstances. For example, the big cats were better physically endowed to exploit their environment and it took many generations for man to learn how to survive but survive they did and more. In time, man began to extricate himself from the fears which marked their encounters with other animals so effectively that other species began to be wary of the new Lord of the jungle who was master of all he surveyed. The result of a recent experiment showed that man was the most feared predator in the jungle. They elicited more fear from other animals than the fabled lion, the so called king of the jungle. In the course of this experiment other animals including the mighty elephant took evasive action and sought out a safe haven more quickly when they heard human voices than when they were bombarded with the roar of a lion. In other words, for all the denizens of the global jungle, the fear of that physically insignificant creature called Man, is the beginning of wisdom. Man is without doubt the global apex predator and the major determinant of the future direction of all other species on earth. Unfortunately, man has not used his powers with any sense of responsibility, which is why it is expected that human activity will, in course of time precipitate, the eighth and most extensive major extinction process with which the earth has been confronted. After all, humans have now caused the extinction of many thousands of other species and the extinction rate is accelerating alarmingly. The point is, man, by his activities chooses those other species with which to share the earth. All those which do not make muster are invariably bound for extinction.

    Margaret Mead, one of the most influential anthropologists that ever lived, was once asked what was the most important early sign of a civilised human community. Her immediate response was, the presence of a skeleton with a fractured femur that had healed a considerable length of time before death.

    The femur is the largest bone in the body and takes a long time to heal once it is fractured. All throughout that extended period of healing, the sufferer is a complete invalid and must be looked after by other persons at a time when he is useless to the community. A group of people who have developed the empathy required to accommodate such a burden is one that has earned the tag of civilisation as it has demonstrated unequivocally, the most potent sign of true human civilization. It is not encountered in other species. A lion with a thorn in its paw is not likely to survive for very long as being incapable of hunting, it has become a prime candidate for starvation. Any more serious incapacitation means death within a short while.

    Man arrived on top of the pile because of his ability to harness the power of  every member of the group for a cooperative existence and anything that breaks this mode of existence however slightly is a serious challenge to the continued existence of every member of the group. For this reason any overt acts of individualism spells danger for the  community as a whole.

    Before the fortuitous discovery of agriculture, man lived in small mobile bands which foraged for food and other essentials such as shelter and security. Man was a hunter of other animals and gatherer of plants for consumption. He had to move around in order to do his hunting and gathering in the most effective manner. Therefore, it was only common sense for communities to share whatever they had in a fair and equitable manner if the community was going to survive, let alone prosper and grow. That is a proper definition of socialism which today exists only in the imagination or in Utopia, that mythical and totally imaginary land of human happiness and satisfaction.

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    Just over ten thousand years ago, mankind stumbled on the science of agriculture and started domesticating both plants and animals other than himself and began to use them as food. Birds, especially the humble chicken have made the most generous contribution to human nutrition in the last few thousand years. Given the ready availability of food crops and domesticated animals, man no longer needed to move around in a relentless search for food and so, he began to build settled communities within which to grow. Those communities grew by producing an excess of food thereby reducing the fear of starvation which had preyed on the collective minds of men throughout their existence up till that point. True, famines have tormented man from time to time these episodes have been caused by unforeseen  circumstances in the manner of accidents in nature. As man advanced on the path of civilization, it is becoming more unlikely that people anywhere will be exposed to suffer the pangs of hunger leading to death on a massive scale in any part of the world. Hunger is now a personal tragedy from which people suffer in times of economic depression and war.

    The scale of social  evolution which has occurred in human communities over the last ten thousand years has been massively impressive. As with the typical chemical reaction, there was a need to overcome an initial inertia which meant that for a few thousand years, progress was hardly discernible but when it took off finally it went off with a big bang.

    Starting from Egypt, civilization went round the Mediterranean rim and enlightenment went before it. The rule of law as shown by the Code of Hammurabi established the relations between the citizen and the state, a situation that was further developed by the Greeks and then the Romans. Mankind rose above the dross of his earlier existence and took his place among the stars. Even when civilization was dimmed in the West, the forces of Islam arrived on the scene to first of all defend the intellectual inheritance of Greek scholars and then delivered it to the West to spark the Renaissance. Human development in science followed and the investigation of natural law was harnessed to civil law to give the impression that happiness could be the lot of the human race.

    Unfortunately, under all the glitter of human achievement, there was a darkness at the heart of it all and the achievement of genuine happiness appeared to be consistently at least one step away, standing tantalisingly out of reach.

    There is only one human race, all of us originating in Africa. Some human subspecies such as the Neanderthals who encountered Homo sapiens in Europe had developed as others had in some other parts of the world but none of them have survived. Only Homo sapiens has stood the test of time. Even then, mankind has preyed on itself, separating themselves into competing clans on the bases of skin colour and other physical differences. They have even gone on to enslave each other in the spurious belief that some are superior to others. Even within the artificial groups created, the desire to dominate has given rise to oppressors and the oppressed, with some having far too much of the share of available communal wealth. Some are called kings and are accorded titles and privileges even though they are not immune to the iron laws of nature. They cry and bleed on occasions just like their subjects and just like them look in vain for happiness or even fulfilment. The ascent of man was based on cooperation and the promotion of empathy. These have since been replaced by unhealthy rivalry brought about by plain greed. Now that mankind is at the peak of physical achievement, it is time to start looking for genuine psychological satisfaction.

    When Adam delved and Eve spun

    Who then was a gentleman?

    (Who indeed?)

    Question posed by revolting peasants to King Richard II of England in 1381.

  • Oil in the Middle East equation

    Oil in the Middle East equation

    Exactly fifty years ago, combined Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked Israel on the Jewish holy holiday of Yom Kippur and did some extensive damage to Israeli military capabilities. The powerful Israeli war machine was initially taken by surprise and suffered considerable damage to their undoubted brutal capacity to wage war. However, after the initial and unexpected success of the Arab armies, the Israeli armed forces recovered from their uncharacteristic inertia and with more than a little help from their major sponsor, the United States, began to fight back vigorously. Within a few days, the invading armies had been pushed back and the status quo ante had been restored. And the Palestinians on behalf of whom the surrounding Arab armies had launched their attack were forced back into their wretched camps, to resume their tedious life in exile.

    Although the mission to liberate the Palestinians and extract them from under Israeli boots failed, the world was made to feel the weight of combined Arab displeasure. A lot of the crude oil which fuelled the industrial activities of the rest of the world was extracted from the oil wells which existed in some profusion in Arab lands, especially  in Saudi Arabia. Before what had come to be known as the Yom Kippur war, the price of crude oil was hovering around $3 a barrel and the oil trade was concentrated in the hands of seven Western oil companies, the Oil Sisters who had firm control on oil prices. This control made it possible for those rapacious sisters to set oil prices very low, to the advantage of the industrialised Western countries and to the detriment of the rest of the world. This made it possible for petrol to be sold at the pumps at ridiculously low prices and indulged American preference for monstrously large cars, which burned prodigious amounts of petrol in their powerful internal combustion engines with which they polluted the land with joyous abandon.

    Without the overt help rendered to the Israelis by the USA, the Yom Kippur war would have been a closer affair than it was even, >Ø#Ýthough it must be said that the Arab war effort also had the support of the Soviet Union. The two super powers of the time were flying in arms and ammunition to replace those damaged in the conflict at an unsustainable rate, putting the rest of the world in danger of exposure to a war characterised by a global spread.

    The Arab countries under the political leadership of Saudi Arabia were understandingly miffed by the turn of events which had truncated their jihad and in their helplessness turned to their oil to redress the situation. First, they placed an embargo on the supply of oil to several Western countries with the USA being on top of the list and Japan which did not have a drop of their own oil tagged to the list.

    The effect of the embargo was immediate and shattering as the machines which produced all those home comforts to the Western countries were stopped in their tracks and industrial output fell close to zero. There was very little petrol to dispense in petrol stations and the price of what little was available went through the roof. Life as it was known turned to dust and ashes but more misery was on the way. As a graduate student in England at the time, I experienced the privations which characterised that period first hand. It was the period of three day working weeks, power cuts, very cold winter nights and galloping inflation.

    The embargo did not last very long but when it was lifted, people woke up to an era of expensive oil, the price of which quadrupled within a period of three months or so. Working within the structure of OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), the Saudis relentlessly pushed up the price of crude oil bringing unprecedented prosperity to members of OPEC including Nigeria, or perhaps more appropriately, especially Nigeria. The consequences of that glorious or if you prefer, inglorious period, were so far reaching that they are still plaguing our lives.

    Money poured in torrents into our national coffers after the Yom Kippur war so much so that according to our overwhelmed Head of State at the time, the availability of money stopped being a problem but how to spend it. Like the proverbial prodigal son, we spent all that largess at a furious rate so that within six years we were broke, stone broke and scandalously deprived. In the mean time, we had acquired such expensive tastes that we could not bear to tone down our newly acquired expensive tastes. But in that short period of affluence we burnt tons of cash mostly in the acquisition of baubles lacking any lasting value.

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    For example, it was at this time that the Federal government took over the ownership of all universities in the land and for good measure abolished the payment of school fees in those institutions. To sweeten the deal further, bursaries were paid to students making tertiary education the cheapest commodity in the land. In an ill-advised fit of generosity, government awarded substantial salary increases to all workers but did not stop at that. Those increases were back dated long enough to create a substantial  nest egg to every worker thus setting off inflationary pressures, the benefits of which are still blighting our lives fifty years later.

     The consequences of the oil embargo and steep increases in the price of crude oil were felt in practically all parts of the world. Changes had to be made to accommodate the new and unpalatable reality, especially in Europe and the USA. Many changes had to be made with the expressed purpose of reducing reliance on crude oil. New technologies were invented and adopted so the amount of oil required to run their economy was drastically reduced, to such an extent that there was the danger of an oil glut and a reduction in oil prices became inevitable, which is the reason why Nigeria got into serious financial difficulty within only a few years.

    Although Japan had no oil and had to suffer like the rest of the world, she was perhaps one of the greatest beneficiaries of the new oil price situation. A great deal of gas was guzzled by those larger than life American cars and one of the immediate consequences of expensive oil was the abandonment of those heavy American cars for nifty Japanese and Korean cars which were so fuel efficient that they could travel vast distances without the need of a refill. This being the case, the centre of the global motor car industry shifted suddenly and decisively from the USA to Japan and Japanese cars began to be the vehicles of choice on roads from New York to New Zealand and everywhere in between. The Japanese did not stop at revolutionising the motor car industry but moved massively away from the production of electrical goods and moved on to the production of electronic gadgets for the simple reason that the manufacturing process for electronic goods consumed far less power than electrical goods. The Japanese economy boomed as a result of these adjustments and at one time threatened to become the workshop to the world. It was only in the last ten to fifteen years that this distinction passed on to China, by far the greatest exporter of manufactured goods the world has ever seen. Coincidentally, like Japan, China has had to import every drop of oil needed to produce goods on an industrial scale.

    Perhaps the most fundamental changes took place in OPEC countries which now had access to more money than they could have possibly dreamt of having only a few years before. What has happened in the Middle East since that time is nothing short of an economic miracle. The governments of these countries, all of them monarchies; Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar set about building social infrastructures at an unprecedented rate, overtaking  Western countries in this regard. Libya under the long lived dictatorship of Gadhafi was another country where massive changes were going on. Norway, a country sitting so close to the arctic circle as to make no difference also benefitted immensely from rising oil prices even though it was not a member of OPEC. The country has continued along the path of her previous existence but has set up a Sovereign wealth fund now worth $1.4 trillion whilst the size of the counterpart fund for Nigeria is a paltry $2.3 billion. The Arab states also have humongous sums of money in their respective sovereign wealth funds. Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar are spending some of these funds to attract positive attention to themselves. Qatar hosted the World Cup last year and Saudi Arabia is looking forward to hosting it in 2034, all from the proceeds of selling crude oil to the rest of the world. To put things in perspective, Nigeria, albeit in a joint venture with Togo and Benin has just lost a bid to host the African Cup of Nations!

    When Sadat launched his army across the Sinaidesert in 1973, his target was freedom for the Palestinians. He could have thought that his adventure was going to change the world in any way let alone the far reaching consequences of that action. Fifty years on Hamas the controlling body in Palestine has followed in the foot prints left in the sand by Sadat. At the end of a Jewish holiday last week, forces loyal to Hamas stormed the formidable ramparts of the occupying Israeli state in an attempt to inflict some damage to Israel and in doing so, remind the world that  Palestinians are still living under intolerable conditions on the fringes of Israel with which no accommodation has been possible. Both Hamas and Hezbollah the ruling body in Lebanon, lack the weapons to push back the Israeli state and there is no doubt that the Israelis will cause a rain of destructive and deadly bombs to fall on Gaza and other places as punishment for the incursion of Hamas into Israel. Israel is now in a state of war and messages of solidarity with Israel are coming from Europe and the USA which, as was the case in 1973, is offering more than spiritual comfort to Israel. In addition, the USA has reinforced her forces in the region by ordering the largest battle ship in the world and her extensive flotilla of support vessels into the region of conflict in the same way as it was flying war material into the region fifty years ago. The action of the USA and her allies precipitated a crisis which changed the world significantly in 1973. Fifty years later, an identical situation has developed and the West has responded in an identical manner. It seems that the inability of governments to learn from history is causing history to repeat itself. Bearing in mind what Nigeria got out of the Yom Kippur war, I wonder what the future holds for Nigeria this time around.