American football star and Nigerian-American Russell Okung has penned an open letter to the Nigerian government, asking it to pursue economic independence and financial sovereignty by adopting Bitcoin.

“Soon every nation will be faced with this decision, but those who seize the present moment proactively as we have just witnessed in El Salvador, will enjoy significant advantages globally for generations to come,” Okung, the NFL’s highest-profile backer of BTC, says in the open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari.

The current global environment, Okung says, is unsustainable.

“Sadly, the fate of the Nigerian economy is in the hands of global central bankers who do not represent the best interests of the Nigerian people,” he writes.

Given that there will only be 21 million Bitcoin ever in circulation, it is more “verifiably finite” than gold, the free agent offensive tackle says.

” As this simple yet unique property of scarcity becomes more widely understood, the economic laws of supply and demand will create a global frenzy to acquire as much bitcoin as possible, before it’s too late.”

With El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as a legal tender and politicians in other Latin American countries considering following suit, Okung urged Nigeria to claim global prominence by rising to the occasion.

“In leading the next global financial shift, Nigeria can create prosperity for its citizens in a manner that requires no bloodshed, no election and no resistance,” he writes.

Nigeria, a country of 206 million, is at risk of becoming Africa’s biggest economic failure, Bloomberg News reported in a long story today.

“A dangerous cauldron of ethnic tension, youth discontent and criminality threatens to spread more poverty and violence to a region quickly falling behind the rest of the world.”

Okung famously asked to be paid in Bitcoin in 2019, back when Bitcoin was trading for less than US$10,000. It was four times that on Tuesday.

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