Encouragement for a struggling Nigerian youth, By ‘Tope Fasua

Some scholars write about the East-West Pendulum; an hypothesis that chronicles how economic development and supremacy shift from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere, every other two or three centuries. Civilisations in China and India were documented to be way ahead of their Western counterpart a few centuries ago. Even here in Africa, we have had great civilisations in Egypt, Benin, Sokoto, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Shonaland (Zimbabwe), Mali, Oyo, and many more, that were comparably ahead of whatever could be mustered in the West several hundreds of years ago. The idea of a civilisation overriding another is that people discover new ways, ideas and methods, from time to time, and have these new ideas imposed on other civilisations through conquest. Therefore, we may not be able to tell where the next overriding idea that redefines civilisations will come from. This exists in the realm of ‘UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS’ and there is a chance that when that idea comes, we may be totally blindsided. I mean something more profound than AI and Robotics. All this is to say that whereas I acknowledge the superiority of the Western civilisation, which has redefined our systems today, imposing new economic systems and standards from within which we define poverty, wealth, success and failure etc., we must make room for anything that could happen in future and I cannot give up on Africa, on Nigeria, on the black man and woman.