Nigeria, Oct. 23 -- There is a dangerous philosophical sickness spreading in northern Nigeria. It has taken hold of the minds of many young people who now claim that one's progress in life is not the result of hard work. I do not even blame them much, because such mindsets are exactly what produce poverty and underdevelopment. If we had not been thinking this way for decades, we would not be sitting at the bottom of every global measure of progress today. This kind of thinking is common among those who have never seen the world beyond their own narrow corners, or those who have seen it but lack the intellectual depth to understand what it teaches. These are what Barack Obama once called the "forgotten corners of the world." People born in...