Nigeria and “The Butterfly Effect”

By Kelechi Deca… Sometime in 1961, Edward Lorenz, a meteorology professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) entered some numbers into a computer program simulating weather patterns and then left his office to get a cup of coffee while the machine ran. When he returned, he noticed a result that altered everything the world thought it knew before then.

On this day, Lorenz was repeating a simulation he’d run earlier—but he had rounded off one variable from .506127 to .506. To his amazement, that tiny alteration drastically transformed the whole pattern his program produced, over two months of simulated weather.

The unexpected result led Lorenz to a powerful insight about the way nature works: small changes can have large consequences. The idea came to be known as the “butterfly effect” after Lorenz suggested that the flap of a butterfly’s wings might ultimately cause a tornado.

And the butterfly effect, also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” has a profound corollary: forecasting the future can be nearly impossible.

His insight turned into the founding principle of Chaos Theory. According to Daniel Rothman of MIT, Butterfly Effect became a wonderful instance of a seemingly esoteric piece of mathematics that had experimentally verifiable applications in the real world. It challenged the classical understanding of nature.

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in 2011, exactly 50 years after this profound discovery, an unknown Mohammed Bouazizi, a fruit seller in the town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, set himself ablaze, in protest against the Police, for confiscating his wares because he lacked a permit to sell fruits along the road. I was in Tunis then; holed up at Hotel Africa, Tunis for two weeks, what I saw left an indelible mark in my psyche. It helped me to learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Nobody could have predicted that that singular act will lead to a cascade of events that will bring down governments in three to four countries. It sparked off crises of unprecedented global proportion engulfing an entire region, leading to one of the worst refugee crises in modern history, and changing our world as we knew it. It took just one man setting himself ablaze to start the Jasmine Revolution, and before long gave rise to the Arab Spring, spreading to Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, and Bahrain among others. That was the Butterfly Effect.

Anytime I read educated Nigerians make predictions on what can and cannot happen in Nigeria,I get worried for their sake and the sake of those who read them. They use the past as their sole predictor of the future. Even if history repeats itself, we do know that it hardly does so in exactly the same way.

10 years ago, we all believed that Nigerians love their lives so much that none will ever contemplate being a suicide bomber. For what, we bellowed! Such idea was far removed that we couldn’t even comprehend it. But today it has become an everyday stuff by Nigerians.

Read also: Because Nigerians Have Not Said No

Anytime I listen to reasonable minds dismiss anything that falls outside their idea of believeability, I tell myself that these guys live in the Moon. As Alvin Toffler once said that “Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.”

When we talk about the need to restructure Nigeria, we do so because we can’t stop the future, but we can shape it.

Restructuring is the ONLY option available to us to sustain this corporate entity called Nigeria. Do not listen to governors who will jump into their private jets to safety leaving us behind. Nigeria’s unity and the unity of every union under the Sun is negotiable.

Let us sit down and agree to agree on the kind of country we want. But to think that you can predict how tomorrow will pan out if we sit here and do nothing to influence its outcome is a joke of the century.

Keep waiting for that Big Bang from maybe Abuja while the little foxes are busy messing up the vine…..the democratization of knowledge has equally democratized the ability to cause huge impacts.

….Na small small Butterfly dey take enter bush…..

 

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