For our brief history, as a country, we have been dealt a very heavy hand in the arena of resources – except for the people and bodies of water, which, if used properly or harnessed, could be the greatest resources, ever. With regard to the people, we are not cultivating human capital the way we should. We are not producing competent, capable and skilled trainees to “Invent the Future.”
In my observation, we are a very creative people, but not inventive, for we lack innovation and ingenuity. This is due to a plethora of factors, among which is our mass production of graduates and over saturation of certain sectors of the job market. The so called fast track focus on quantity – giving a cold shoulder treatment to quality – has been one of the biggest policy blunders of the current administration. We are basically warehousing students, not giving them the right training, and haphazardly dumping them into the real world upon graduation. In America, they have the school to PRISON pipeline; well, in my country, we have the school to NOWHERE pipeline.
These factors, among other things, have limited our capacity to produce the things we consume, for the most part. Rice, which happens to be a staple food in the country, is still not produced enough to meet the demand, meaning we have to import a sizable chunk of the rice we consume. To boot, during the month of Ramadan, we consume a lot of sugar, yet we are still not producing the goods to meet the demand. We consume a lot of beef and mutton during the Tobaski festivities – but we still import a lot of the cattle and sheep during the aforementioned period. You’d be hard pressed to find anything that we consume in mass that’s produced in the country.
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