From This Day Live
By Simon Kolawole
''Acclaimed founder of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Venezuelan politician/lawyer, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, famously said in the midst of the maddening oil boom of the 1970s: “It is the devil’s excrement. We’re drowning in devil’s excrement… Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see: oil will bring us ruin...” He saw something that many other leaders of oil-rich countries might not have seen then: the danger of getting sunk by a flood of petrodollars. He was speaking at a time things appeared rosy and the future looked even more promising. “Look at us,” he warned in 1976, “we are having a crisis… We are dying of indigestion.”
Alfonzo, who died in 1979, saw what many oil-dependent countries, such as Nigeria, could not understand. All we could see then was that our revenue had gone up astronomically—which meant we could triple salaries, backdate it and pay arrears in the name of Udoji awards; we could begin to devote less energy to agriculture and industry and focus on sharing federally-collected revenue every month; we could afford to disconnect the state from the society by deemphasising the role of taxation in governance and focussing instead on the windfall of petrodollars. Alfonzo foresaw trouble. He foresaw mess. He saw a shift in emphasis from economic productivity to parasitic proclivity. He saw a deformation of the structure and the values of the society. It’s a shame Alfonzo is not alive today to see the results of his lamentations—especially in Nigeria.''
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