If Nigeria gets a deal to develop nuclear power with the assistance of Russia, it will mark the beginning of when this nation actually decided to start thinking big thoughts, thoughts that are worthy of its status and place in the world. Nigeria should go ahead and not look back. Nuclear electricity with Russian assistance is not just power supply. It is good politics and pointers to great technical possibilities. Let me be plain with you; it provides a nation with all the pretexts and basic technologies it needs to build atomic weapons in the future. The difference between uranium enrichement for power and for weapons is slim. Ask any disarmament technologist.
Then comes steel and what is the Buhari government waiting for! It is a shame we have waited all these years to have a backbone. It is a spineless nation and frail economy until you have steel – the base for tools, machines, civil works reinforcements and military hardware. Ajaokuta has been a loooong journey of us, made longer, apparently, by foreign nations who will be rather be bereaved than see us have steel and a spine. Some friend yesterday raise the question of housing and what Fashola is up to. I told him that in my view, a huge national housing programme at this time will weaken the naira further with heavy import of reinforcement steel and roofing. It makes sense yo bring Ajaokuta and ALSCON puffing first or you will be loading a scramble for fx in the system. All these things dovetail.
Managing a nuclear plant isn’t hard and has never been. Oh yes; we will turn a new leaf in our culture of maintenance. We will. Managing a nuclear plant is easier than driving within Lagos, or driving at all! You know why Chernobyl exploded? The dumb, second-tier technicians who had plain matenance duty just wanted to test some queer things that was beyond their remit. They were wondering if they could reduce how much power the plant produces by raising some of the rods. The rods got too hot and blew up a reactor. Modern plants have a lot more failsafe features and, yes, we can run one. I think it was Aldrin one of the crew members of Apollo 11 that said their massive lunar ship was a large piece of junk when they came back. He was talking about the fact that the technology was not perfect and they had several things they nearly failed at on that epochal mission. The US only went ahead because they were sore pressed to beat the Soviets to it – the soviets had dusted the Americans in virtually all aspects of space exploration until then and had the Americans failed to reach the moon first, that nation may not have been America today. At times a nation needs to push itself hard and cross a line or it will lose the wave and that precise psychological point of history where it must inspire its citizens. If it misses it, it may have to wait another 100 years. Besides, duty often arouses a sense of responsibility which had been lying latent and thought non existent. I believe one thing this nation needs to rouse her is to attempt great things. I am surprised that a national of about 200 million people is even talking about opening a jet propulsion laboratory. It is a must if we want to get serious and inspire our people. A jet propulsion lab is the ticket to aerospace technology and the manufacturing of missiles and if a nation has none of those programmes, well, it is not a flying nation. It will remain earthbound. We should out heads together and manufacture rockets and start planning to launch our own missiles with range that reach as far as Europe and put payloads in orbit. We have enough brains in our universities to do it.