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The group of seven (G7 or as it is called in recent times G8) came into being (as G5 in 1976 in Paris) on the eve of the anniversary of one hundred years of the Berlin (1883-84) conference on our colonization. The purpose of the group was to find solutions to the economic difficulties of the west at a time when some economies in the developing world were just beginning to bask in their new found oil wealth.

President Reagan of America soon as he came to power in 1980 decided with his political wife, Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time, that some of the leading industrial nations of the west needed to initiate stiff measures to reverse their dwindling economic fortunes and nip OPEC's belligerent oil politics in the bud.

The group of seven, therefore, was a deliberate re-enactment of the Berlin conference on Africa, a hundred years later, to review the cracks in their economic wellbeing and introduce firm measures to reverse our economic gains in their favour.

The group of seven found that there was a strong correlation between their economic fortunes and ours and that the only way their economies could continue to stay bouyant was to keep ours ever dependent on theirs.

On OPEC, the group of seven decided to stock pile oil, cut down on their consumption and waste, develop alternative sources of energy and use, for example, the North Sea oil to distabilize OPEC by attacking it's weakest link, Nigeria.

On Africa, the group of seven from inception decided that we were to be kept severely under the ambit and influence of the west politically through direct financial and military support for anti-African forces and economically through the IMF, the World Bank, London and Paris clubs' coercion.

Africans were to be specially trained by the IMF and the World Bank and designated financial wizards to ease their take over of African economic heights for the west.

The group of seven decided that South Africa should remain under white control. That all pressures to the contrary should be vehemently resisted while openly condemning the system of apartheid to placade world opinion.

The group of seven mandated Israal to form close links with South Africa, particularly in the area of defence and to infiltrate African regimes and customs for information and elimination of anti-western sentiments.

On Nigeria, the group of seven decided to immediately begin to check our anti-western stance because of our growing influence in Africa as a result of our population and potential mineral wealth. Western leaders were to move closer to us through visits and encouragement with awards and symbolic favours to continue our brainwashing. Plans were finalised to deal with the more articulate members of our society such as students, intellectuals, committed writers and patriots by branding them as aggitators, and extremists and preventing them from holding positions of power and influence.

The developing world and Africa in particular were to be goaded to liberalize their economic laws in the name of free market forces, through debt swop and adjustment scenarios.

The 1988 Toronto conference of the group of seven was called specifically to review the gains they had already made as regards our gradual re-colonization. The noise over debt rescheduling then or at subsequent G7 conferences were, therefore, merely a diversion.

On the BBC early morning news of Monday the 20th of June, 1988, Margaret Thatcher was quoted as telling her colleagues at the G7 Toronto conference: " Our economies are buoyant again having achieved complete recovery. We are not here to initiate any change, our purpose is to strengthen our principles and resolve."

President Reagan was quoted on the same BBC six-o-clock world news to have said: As I leave office, " my advise is, don't change anything, we are on the right track."

What we must ask ourselves is what their coded messages were about? What was the 'thing' they were not supposed to change, now that their economies are buoyant again while ours are stagnating?

The communique after the conference claimed that "with the co-operation of the G7 leadrers, the world's economies are looking up again," ignoring tottering developing world's economies.

The truth of the matter is that we must not be allowed to catch up economically with the west. There is a deliberately engineered dependency relationship between our economies. Without our markets and cheap sources of raw materials, their economies are doomed. The G7 is, therefore, the modern name for a regularized 1884 Berlin conference on African political and economic strangulation. The strategy is to starve us silly because a hungry man lacks the strength to fight back.

Obasanjo as military Head of state and Shehu Shagari as President, both of Nigeria stoutly resisted IMF and World Bank interference in our economic affairs although without putting viable alternative programmes in place.

Buhari who came in the military coup of December 1983, provided a home-grown alternative to SAP. It was to maintain a strong naira at approximately one to the US$1.50. Stop all further borrowing from abroad and institute counter trade for essential or desperately needed commodities. Buhari put an upper limit on our foreign exchange earnings to service foreign debts.

Even Britain was already scheming to enter into counter trade agreement with Nigeria when Babangida was sponsored by the west to reverse our gains. America, Britain and the other leading western nations hailed Babangida's coup and immediately sent emisaries to strategize with him. President Reagan went out of his way to send him gifts including books such as Niccolo Machiavelli's: The Prince, advocating the destruction of civil freedom to strengthen despotism.

Babangida who crowned himself the Prince of the Niger, pretended to allow a debate on SAP. The masses rejected the IMF programme but Babangida went along with the IMF all the same and instituted what he described as his version of SAP.

Babangida's SAP re-launched our re-colonization in earnest. The leading architects of SAP were two World Bank and IMF trained experts: Chiefs Idika Kalu and Olu Falae who argued that our economy would collapse without SAP. Our economy promptly collapsed despite SAP.

We were told too by the SAP protagonists that we needed to increase our foreign currency earnings to be able to pay our strangulating foreign debts; import more goods and, of course, technology that use foreign raw materials and spare parts to stay in operation. SAP we were told, ensures increased foreign exchange earnings by liberalising trade and scandalously marginalising the naira to enhance our export capabilities. Share jargon because, the liberalising business turned out to be a one way trap. A vicious circle in effect, encouraging us to export more at low prices to import more at high prices because they dictate the prices and no matter what we do, we always end up the debtors.

Our IMF African gurus argued that afterall, the Japanese yen was 120 or so to the dollar. What they concealed from us is that Japan is an export dependent country. They have no raw materials. Their export is totally based on what they manufacture. The yen was fixed deliberately from inception, with local values in mind same was as a hundred British shillings was fixed to produce one pound. In other words, the yen was worth a shilling relatively, from the start. The yen didn't just jump overnight from 1 - 120 to the dollar as African currences were forced to do by the IMF.

When the yen wobbles a fraction or two downwards in strength, the Japanese government panics and moves close to declaring a national emergency. In general, the yen gets stronger against the dollar yearly and the current projection is that it would exchange 115 to the dollar two years from now. It would be a miracle if the naira has not jumped from its current 120 to a new rate of 1000 to the dollar by then because it leaps abnormally downwards only.

That is how the Ghananian cedi catapaulted to its current 7,555 to the dollar in twenty years. The government can hardly pay teachers salaries now. They have collateralized their gold mines to the west to keep afloat. Without regular foreign aids and donor support, budgets would not balance yearly. The people are so poor and helpless, they are dying out gradually on food not fit for even rats.

The foreigners we are trying to pacify are not investing in our economies. Of course, yes, they are grabbing our forced privatised parastatals like the airways, power and steel, oil, mines, communications to consolidate their control mechanisms and our total emasculation. Why should they invest in the other sectors to earn our worthless currencies? Today, you need to work 120 times as hard in Nigeria as you would in the USA to earn a lousy dollar.

Our economy is in comtose. Factories have largely all closed down. The few still in business are operating at bellow 20% of installed capacity, resulting in massive unemployment. Warehouses are full of unsold goods.

No one needs to bring money from abroad to do business in Nigeria, rather Indians and Lebanese are printing the local currency (naira) illegally to buy up privatised industries and our hard earned petrol dollars to send home. They operate illegal private banks from several bases around the country. Some of the bases in Apapa, a suburb of Lagos for instance, are well known to the security personnel who even patronize them. The foreigners have no respect for our laws because they are fronts for our leaders and retired generals and where that fails, they can buy off law enforcement agents.

The only group of people making it, apart from the foreign manufacturers exporting to us and the Indian and Lebanese crooks in our midst, are our banks round tripping on the exchange rate scheme; senior government officials siphoning our resources into their private accounts abroad; their relations favoured with plum government contacts that are paid for without performance; drug barons and the 419 (con-men) kingpins. Nothing productive is going on right now in our society. We import everything from sand, toxic waste, toothpicks to broken bottles just to earn the opportunity to export Nigerian petrol dollars. The middle class has been completely wiped out. All we are left with are the rogues and the very poor.

The people determining the exchange rate are, of course, the rogues from the unproductive sector of the economy. They are the ones with access to banks' bidding facilities for foreign exchange allocations. These are arm-chair opportunists working off their briefcases. They don't employ staff or need office accommodation. Every naira they corner, they convert into dollars immediately and transfer abroad.

During the week-ending 24th June 2001, a senior government official who was Chairperson of our ports announced (and as expected quickly denied it the following day) that five container loads of Nigeria's new N500 notes were impounded at the Apapa ports by the Nigerian customs. That kind of money (obviously in trillions of naira) would be enough to wipe out Nigeria's hundred years oil sales revenue in one swoop and oil is the mainstay of the Nigerian economy. The fake currences were as good as our genuine ones and the owners would have been in a position to pay a thousand, two thousand or even a million naira of it to buy a dollar. Even if they spent one million dollars to print it, they could buy billions of dollars with it to take out. These are the people determining the fate of the exchange rate.

The ordinary everyday Nigerian worker: doctor, lawyer, teacher, secretary, market woman, taxi driver, roadside mechanic etc do not make any contribution to the determination of the value of the naira. And yet, they work very hard, so hard that they are the most stressed people in the world, just to earn N120 a day to buy a dollar's worth of value. It takes less than five seconds for the average worker to earn a dollar in the USA but the Nigerian needs to work a whole day for it because the west wants him to remain ever poor and dependent on them.

It is the dollar that determines the value of local products. Everyone is calculating prices by it since the government trades with it and values it more than the naira. A whole day's wage (which is five seconds wage in the USA) can only buy two jerricans of gari now or four ripe plantains. How can that be value for labour and for exchanging the naira? No one can feed himself and his family that way? Not all of us have jobs so, a day's wage for a meal a day per person, is sending all of us to our early graves.

Even South Africans whose exchange rate has been deteriorating under IMF and World Bank pressures since Africans took over the polity, is still a lot healtheir than the naira at about 8 rands to the dollar. When whites were in power, there was no IMF and World bank pressure and the rand exchanged for about 2 to the dollar. Egypt's pound exchanges for 4 to the dollar and Gambia's dalasi is 15 to the dollar. Their natives do not each work with four hands nor do they have more hours to the day or richer economic resources than Nigerian have.

Economic experts from around the world often paraphrase their economic theories with: " all things being equal." Our IMF and World Bank trained African financial wizards interprete this with their heads buried in the sand because it is obvious even to the most illiterate person that all things are not equal in African economies.

We are often a one export product economies. The buyer insists we drastically devalue our currencies because that is the only way we can compete. Compete to do what? We don't manufacture anything. They would not allow us or when they do, they say ours are sustandard and put up all sorts of regulations to bar our entry into their markets. They flood our markets with their junks and rejects anyway, so we don't have time to think of competing. All we have to sell of our own are raw materials and they fix the prices and pay in their currencies. They force us to trade in their currencies. Our governments, banks everybody trades in the foreign currencies. The local currencies respond by continually falling in value to catch the scarce 'real ' money coming from abroad.

Nigeria, for example, after paying $17 billion (N1,955 trillion) over the years is still owing $28 billion (N3,220 trillion) for a debt of $13 billion (N8 billion) owed twenty years ago, so who is the fool, the IMF and the World Bank or Nigeria? At the rate they are manipulating us, we would continue to be indebted to our colonial masters for another one million years even if we never borrowed a dime from them again.

Because of the gross marginalisation of the naira, all our infrastructural facilities have broken down. It is too expensive to replace them or buy spare parts. Hopitals have no drugs and no new hospitals are being built. Nurses are not being paid on time and receive pittance when paid. Doctors have become government contractors to survive, neglecting their professional callings.

Our educational system is in shambles. When not closed down, there are no books or teaching aids. They are too expensive to procure. No one can afford to buy books and so no one is reading excepting the bible and the koran which are dumped in millions of copies on us free of charge to keep us ever illiterate and subservient to them. Most teachers have even migrated abroad to more lucrative jobs. Thousands of our youths are unemployed and thousands more waste away at home because schools are closed for a year for every month they open. The most actively pursued business by Nigerians right now are visas to jump the Nigerian sinking ship.

Social services are nothing to write home about. Roads are impassable for pot-holes and floods. We queue for days on end to buy petrol, wasting otherwise valuable man hours in the process. We have no drinking and cooking water in most homes, no electricity generally for months at a time and yet the authorities are threatening to increase their tariffs.

Telephones are a luxury thanks to David Mark's remarks when he was Minister of Communications, and yet telephones are unreliable. It costs a day's average wage to post an ordinary letter by air abroad and still the letter gets stolen or tampered with before destination.

We are under severe seige as a people thanks to the IMF and the World Bank's marginalisation of the naira. Fear now rules our daily lives. Ugly, harrowing fear of the known and unknown. When we go out in the mornings, we are not sure we would return home safely and with our cars, bikes and other properties, including even the shoes on our feet or the earrings in our ears. If we are lucky to arrive to find our homes unraided in our absence, we sleep with one eye open expecting the worst any moment of the night. In other words, we do not sleep any more, and psychologists must have a thing or two to say about the consequences of lack of sleep on our ability to perform daily chores.

The orchins controlling our lives are no longer the illiterate, no-good, lay-abouts of yesteryears but generally smart looking, well educated and spoken people who could pass any day for bank executives. They are graduates of our higher institutions of learning unable to find employment for as many as 8 to 20 years.

Societal values have completly broken down. Marriages are dissolving as soon as they are contracted. Children have lost respect for their hapless parents who can neither protect them nor provide their basic needs. hard won earnings can no longer buy simple everyday necessities of life, not even gari, our staple food, let alone encourage us to aspire to own a car or a home in a life time. Many wives are prostituting to help families make do with the one measly meal a day now available to only a few in society. Many of our daughters leave their University dormitories at night to kawk their bodies to pay school fees and feed. The boys hold up banks, petrol stations during day ligh and whole communities at night in convoys and formations reminiscent of military operations, all to make ends meet.

Lying, cheating, pulling tricks have become virtues and friends and neighbours are usually the first casualties. No one and nothing is spared in the new culture of destruction. Suicides have become common place and obituaries are largely about people in their 30s to 50s. The supposed productive age in society.

A friend said to me recently, it is not that Nigerians have suddenly begun to give birth to criminals. We are all capable, as human beings, of good and evil. The degree to which society tilts to one extreme or the other, is determined by the extent of economic deprivations. Right now, we are going through the worst economic experience in our history. It has been growing steadily for some twenty years and we have now lost interest in the joy of living. There is nothing to live for any more. No ideals, no properties. Nothing makes sense right now and our society can no longer hold us.

We have become irritable, snappy and careless about issues affecting our collective wellbeing. Patriotism has taken a back seat. Only the fittest and well armed can now survive. A new culture of brutality has taken hold. a barbaric and merciless pre-occupation that crushes everything in its path.

Armed robbers kill just for the fun of it and to watch us agonize in pains. Dead bodies are every where. On the streets and in open graves, deliberately piled in sadistic heaps to poison the atmoshpere.

Our present worthless, nasty, violent life, infest our kids and will infest theirs also like a virus without cure because no one has the courage and vision to put a stop to our rot and gradual disintegration.

Argentina was in similar predicament to our own in the late eighties. They reversed their plight and took control of their economic heights in 1990 by creating a new currency called the Peso, pegging it one to the dollar and making it convertible apart from other fiscal measures. They also threatened to stop paying their debt if anyone interferred with their plans. We can borrow a leaf from Argentina's boldness to bring smiles back to the faces of our suffering people.

The world would not come to an end if we restored our naira to its pre-Babangida's strength. The IMF has not stopped doing business with Argentina for taking their economic destiny into their own hands. If anything, the IMF is more excited today about Argentina than they are about Nigeria that is slavishly implementing IMF's racist, wicked and senseless conditionalities that have reduced Nigerians to the poorest among the poor in the world despite our immense natural wealth.

The World Bank and the IMF do not dictate to the countires of Europe and America, so why should we surrender our sovereignty to them after shedding so much of our people's blood to reach here? What is the point of having a national currency if we are going to be trading in a foreign one?

The only way forward for Nigeria is to forget about the IMF and the World Bank which are instruments of our control by the west. The Nigerian President must give us a naira worthy of our labour, faith in our nation and our pride as a people. The President must change the present naira, it could be the colour or whatever, fix it one to the dollar and use economic policies to sustain the new rate of exchange as the Central Bank is doing at the moment after being instructed not to allow the naira to slide beyond 120 to the dollar.

The IMF says don't fix it but bidders are fixing it so why should crooks be fixing it for us? How did any exchange rate start? The British pound was fixed and is controlled daily within fixed limits by economic policies. The American, French, German currences were all fixed and are being maintained within limits with stringent economic measures. They have to be in a war situation in which they are the underdogs to lose control of their currences.

The naira's marginalisation to 9 or so to the dollar at the inception of Babangida's SAP was forced and fixed with economic indices that disrespecte the economic axion: "all things being equal." It has continued to slide dangeroursly since, due to unpatriotic and lax economic policies. If fixing is regulation, Babangida did it to the naira with SAP, all bidders for the dollars through the Central Bank are doing it right now and we are in the good company of the leading economies of the world, anyway.

The Central Bank should allocate foreign currences according to the share capital, turnover or any other economic criteria relevant to banking operations; fix the naira's initial rates same way a company would fix the price to sell its products basedon local labour and production costs rather than foreign ones. Make the currency convertible and wedge it with strong economic policies and punitive measures that include the withdrawal of trading and banking licences apart from the defaulting bosses serving long terms in prison. The parallet market should be monitored with merciless alacrity. If necessary, a national emergency should be declared to sensitize all to the war situation against external forces for our survival.

All non-essential imports should attract prohibitive tariffs and all imports should be subjected to a hundred percent local inspection by customs. It does not mean we are dropping out of the world trade. No one would stop buying our sweet oil. We are simply protecting our interest like all the developed economies of the world do. If any one is not happy, we stop paying our debt. At our realistic exchange rate anyway, we can afford to pay off our debt rapidly or trade it for raw materials if we so decide. We have gold, diamong, tantalite, uranium, everything so what is our problem? Many of these are being illegally mined by foreigners in the wilds of Taraba and so on right now. Nature didn't want us to be poor.

With strong, patriotic economic policies like Argentina's or even China, we de-emphasize the importance of foreign currences and the necessity to trade exclusivly in them. Clip the wings of our economic saboteurs terrorizing us the their loots. Our labour and productivity would regain their appropriate values and everyone would be able to aspire once again to rent a flat, feed and send children to school or own a car in a life time.

Industries would begin to return to our shores because local purchasing power has improved. Instead of exporting to die, let's manufacture to feed ourselves first. Problems of unemployment would begin to recede significantly with more industries springing up and the debilitating poverty currently plaguing us would be curtailed drastically. Infrastructure would be cheap and easy to maintain and new ones built at costs commensurate with the real worth of our labour and productivity and universal rates and norm.

This must be considered as the most important task facing the government of Nigeria right now if we are not to disappear entirely from the face of the earth by the morning.

We must stop waving a tattered, dirty, smelly, valueless naira at international economic fora. We must win our respect and dignity back as a sovereign nation with a strong naira. We have the resources to back our resolve, why should our currency be the weakest?

We must take back control of our economy and based on his feat withZimbabwe's independence, Obasanjo can do it. If he does not want to or cannot for whatever reason, he must give way to someone, anyone who can rescue Nigeria. It is very urgent. It has to be done before the cockcrow at dawn and by a one man riot squard, a Murtala's incarnate, because there are too many stoogies of the west in our corridors of power. Hope must be restored to all Nigerians by the morning for the gains of democracy to begin to manifest.

We have less than a minute to zero hour to act and if an upstart Major were to go on the radio now to announce he has fixed the naira exchange rate at one to the dollar, Nigerians would dance in the streets. It is this possible interregnum (people dancing in the streets because life is beginning to make sense again) that I am asking the elite in power to exploit hopefully to save their necks and our dear fatherland.

There is no where in history where the elite handed over power to itself to effect drastic societal change. Bloody revolutions precipitated every major change and Nigeria cannot be an exception. We are already on the precipice with a potential army of 120 million hungry people at the end of their tetthers. It would be nasty and merciless because no group of people have been so brutalized by all and saundry for so long.

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