Made in Nigeria

Flipping through Nigerian fashion magazines, most of the things I see are foreign designers. We read blogs and see how the “first class” citizens of Nigeria are constantly having shopping sprees in “Obodo oyinbo”. We watch Tv and see how foreigners celebrate their own “Made in” their respective countries and how most of these designers, merchants, producers, etcetera, are constantly being praised as the top shots in their respective fields. We join in these celebrations, we eagerly yearn to be a part of these successes but have we ever stopped to think and realize that WE are the major contributors of these successes?

We complain of bad roads, poor electricity, no water, bad drainage, all of these are the end time results of not investing in our dear country, Nigeria. We have finally gotten ourselves addicted to the “craze” of “if it aint made in the UK or US, it can’t be of good quality”. It has gotten to the sad point where a  little girl, on a shopping outing with her mum in the highbrow region of Lagos, sees a pretty dress, falls in love with it on the spot and shows her mum what her heart desires. Mummy, with a smile on her face, admires this lovely choice her daughter made, only to check out the tag and finds that it is made in Aba. The frown on mummy’s face deflates this little girl’s enthusiasm as she watches her mummy quickly hang back this pretty dress! This little girl just can’t seem to understand why! Mummy ushers her to another section of the store called “Foreign” and asks her to pick her choices from here. Little girl, with no choice, had to make do with these. What this implies is that this little girl will grow up with the mentality that there is something definitely wrong with that section of the store labeled “Made in Nigeria”.

SENATOR BEN MURRAY-BRUCE BUYING MADE IN NIGERIA SHOES

All across the country, we see imported milk, imported shoes, imported rice and even imported fish! We are buying all of these at a very high rate just because of a mentality we are trying so hard to fit into. What is wrong with an Aba made dress? A material with good quality and sewn to size sounds like a very good buy to me. If Aba or Ajegunle have some smart kids designing all of these, please educate me, what is wrong with that?

The end result to all of these is that things get smoother and better in these foreign countries but we just can’t seem to understand why things are so hard for us here. The common language we hear now is “things never work in this country”. The latest one is the idiom in Yoruba, “dollar ti won” which means “dollar is expensive”. Why wouldn’t it be expensive when we don’t patronize our own?! Why would our roads be in good shape when major part of our country’s resources is being spent on foreigners? Weather we agree to admit this or not, this habit, as little as buying a single strand of Brazilian hair, is causing collateral damage somewhere, somehow on our economy. It is a collective effort into negativity.   Is mummy in the above story indirectly telling her little girl she cannot produce or manufacture anything good and worthy to be bought?

Why not join these collective efforts as a people to invest in our own talents, our own creativity, our own sweat and turn them into our good roads, our power supply 247, our free education for all at the end of the day. Let us stop hurting ourselves. Please give us a chance!

We are black…we are African… and we are proudly Made in Nigeria.