The chairman, your excellencies, your majesties, distinguished ladies and gentlemen.

Dele, congratulations on your birthday.

Let me share a story with us and you can contextualize it as you may.

In 1985, I was a young intern in a law firm in Washington DC called Bacon Hostetler. My immediate boss was a lady; the late Mrs Betty Murphy, who was Secretary of Labor under Ronald Wilson Reagan, and one afternoon she invited me to her office and in a rebuking manner asked me a question what was wrong with Nigeria. I was barely 23 years old, so I didn’t understand what she talked about but I just felt that everything was wrong with Nigeria at the time.

She said she had just come back come out come back from the White House and had a meeting with the Chief of Staff to President Reagan and she said they were very upset with Nigeria. They had proposed building a trans-African pipeline from Nigeria’s Niger Delta through Niger into Algeria to Europe to forestall Soviet gas it was the politics of gas, we’re talking about leadership here. I thought it was a brilliant idea. She talked about the Niger Delta. At that time, I didn’t even understand what the Niger Delta was all about but it was going to be paid for by the Western World. All they wanted from us was agreement and they would do it. And from there we could tee off gas to distribute to the rest of the country. But we gave a condition and the condition was the United States will have to pull out of South Africa.

She said it was a very stupid thing for us to do and I agree; that you first get what you want you know like in the aircraft you wear your mask before you look after others and she said no one gives the United States conditions. She reminded me of the Bay of Pigs where there were missiles of Soviet missiles facing the United States. There were also NATO missiles in Turkey facing the Soviet Union at the time but the condition the Russians gave was of course; you take out your missiles from Turkey and we’ll take out our missiles from from Cuba. The Americans agreed but on the condition that you do not tell the world that we obliged to you. It would have made more sense if we had agreed and would have had a lot more leverage if we had agreed to allow the pipeline to go through.

Today, it’s a difficult situation because you’re going to go through Niger, and Niger has fully aligned with Russia today. I do not think they would even allow that to happen. But this is a nation that at one point we were flaring 2.5 billion cubic feet of gas daily that’s an equivalent of 25 million liters of diesel. You think of it, for over 40 years we were flaring, burning 25 million liters of diesel.

Talking about in the abundance of water, the foolish is thirsty.

Thank you.