Look back at 2008 and ask yourself several questions. Did you think crude oil prices would climb to over 100 USD per barrel; Lehman Brothers would collapse, a black man would become the 44th US president in your lifetime; a sitting Nigerian president would be out of the country for weeks without a coup or an attempted coup for that matter; a Nigerian would be named as one of the 50 most powerful beings on earth and the Nigerian stock market would dip by over 30% in market capitalization. Those were some of the events that redefined a year we at InCorporate Nigeria Magazine have to come to refer to as ‘The Year of Unimaginable Possibilities’.

We all should have seen this coming. It all started in early January 2008 when crude oil prices reached over $140 per barrel for the very first time in the history of mankind. Little did we know that this incident signaled the beginning of a year that would end with amazing and heart rendering events that would shape Nigeria’s economic and political future and the world by extension?

Few days after and in the same month, stock markets across the world took a plunge having come to reality with the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the United States. At this time, technocrats at the helm of economic affairs in the United States continued to deny the emergence of recession in the world’s largest economy which was quite in contrast with discussions within academic circles and college classes where there was a general consensus that the United States was already in a depression.

Lately, I have been in several discussions reflecting on the reasons for passwords in our generation. Only about 2 decades ago, our parents had little or nothing to worry as passwords were not necessary. Today, we live in a fast changing world and we are challenged with an ever increasing need for passwords each day.

For instance, an average professional has between 6 to 10 passwords to cram on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. The use of passwords in the life of an average professional starts right at the beginning of the day when he needs to gain access to his office if it requires a password.

Logging into the computer at work; accessing the company software application; checking our ‘yahoo’ or ‘hotmail’ accounts’ e-mails and messenger accounts; checking the online bank accounts require passwords and in some cases more than 1; your pension fund account; the ATM pin, social networking pages such as ‘Facebook’, ‘MySpace’ and ‘Youtube’ account also adds to the daily dilemma of keeping passwords in the head.

I do not doubt many of us recall growing up with the popular notion that Nigeria, albeit Africa experienced a brain drain in the mid and late nineties. That decade witnessed the breakdown of social order in Nigeria owing to the June 12 political crisis and a number of political incidents. Most African countries also witnessed a huge exodus of skilled professionals from their native land as academics, professionals and skilled medical personnel headed to North America, Europe and the Middle East.

Even Nigerian sportsmen were not left out. At the height of the exodus, a famous judoka and sprinter dumped their Nigerian nationality for other countries.

The first few years of this century saw the growing influence of Nigerians in Diaspora with Nigeria being regarded as one of the countries with the greatest number of educated foreigners in the United States. This is accentuated by the fact that by 2002, about 64% of foreign-born Nigerians in the United States aged 25 and older have at least a first degree.