He won a scholarship to university and went on to invent a formula that lets computers make 3.1 billion calculations per second. Some people call him the Bill Gates of Africa. He went ahead and poured encomiums on Chief Gani Fawehinmi, the late Shehu Yar Adua, King Sunny Ade, Prof. Chinua Achebe, Prof. Wole Soyinka, Chief Anthony Enahoro and Ben Okri, the writer of The Famished Road. Your Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, has written that he imagines a day when Nigeria is an unstoppable nation, one whose citizens anywhere in the world would be revered simply by the very possession of a Nigerian passport. I believe the answer to all those questions can, and must be yes.
Real change demands perseverance and patience.
It demands openness to honourable compromise and cooperation. It demands support on a constant basis from the people of Nigeria and from your friends abroad. It took my own country almost 90 years and a bitter civil war to set every American free. It took another 100 years to give every American the basic rights our constitution promised them from the beginning. President Clinton has come and gone and he has left Nigeria not exactly as he met it.