Tomorrow, Tuesday, Oct 1, 2024, Nigeria will be 64 years old. In the realms of man, the person called Nigeria should have been a retired grandfather, surrounded by a cluster of successful children and grandchildren who would be clamouring to extend their support to his weakening bones. As a man that worked hard in the right direction, he should no longer have been talking about not finding something to eat or drink or not having a bed to sleep at night, or a cool spot in his household to relax when necessary. He should, indeed cut the picture of the wise ant enjoying the warmth of the earth’s belly having laboured in sunshine to stock up his household in readiness for the rainy day.
Our 64-year-old Nigeria, rather than answer to the positive attributes mentioned above, quite unfortunately, can be described as a wreck, having squandered its riches and refusing to retrace its steps even in the face of protests and agitation from its dependents. From Sokoto to Lagos, Maiduguri to Calabar, he finds no place to relax without being awakened by bandits, Boko Haram, kidnappers, Biafra agitators, Niger Delta militants, killer herdsmen, or just disillusioned unemployed youths clamouring for a better society as well as internally displaced persons begging for attention.
Nigeria’s major headache as it staggers through tide and time has been political leadership and structure. It is this void in purposeful leadership that accidentally brought the soldiers into government, thereby compounding the country’s problems. The soldiers, in their 30 years of leadership out of the 64 being counted today after independence, could not find the answer to our corruption, ethnicism and religious bigotry. At independence, Nigeria embraced the concept of national development planning. Governments had development plans which crashed like dreams of an incapacitated person.
As the leadership continued to change with successive coups and counter coups, various rolling plans sprang up without actually rolling into reality. Policy decisions were taken not on the basis of data, not because of dire need, not merit, but on the whims and caprices of whoever held the reins of power. Rational judgment over matters gave way to ethnic jingoism while profligacy ruled our financial world. The God-sent oil boom of the 70s was frittered away in frivolous projects. While our youth yearned for jobs, our leaders considered festival of arts and culture more expedient to host than expand our industrial base.
Today, we suffer for our sins in the past. Our electricity supply is everything but dependable, our villages and urban settlements are attacked by guinea-worm and typhoid fever due to poor water supply. Our roads are impassable and housing is out of the reach of a great majority. Productive industries domiciled in the major cities of the country in the past have vanished and our youths now find employment in insurgency groups and crime. No more Michelin tyres, no Dunlop, no Berec Batteries, no Phillips radio, National, Sanyo, Volks Wagen, Peugeot, etc. The Bata shoe factories, textile mills and many others that made the Nigeria of old bubble economically are things of the past. Nigeria gnashes its teeth in the midst of plenty.
Worst of all, the country that had four refineries servicing the people’s energy needs now has none functional. While money is siphoned through recurrent turnaround maintenances, the nation suffers fuel shortage to the extent that transportation costs have carried inflation to ridiculous heights. Such has been the nation’s portion for 64 years, 64 solid years of foolery. A fool at 40, they say, is a fool forever. What about a fool at 60?
Twenty-five years ago, Nigeria began a new experiment in democratic governance that gave the nation some hope. Even when we fumbled and floundered in this march toward an enduring political structure, the masses were then united in saying that, at least, we had begun a journey to rationality. At that stage, Nigerians saw a bright future for the nation’s citizens.
Very unfortunately, 25 years after that supposed return to democracy, Nigerians can hardly say today that it’s indeed a democracy for the people. Scam elections rule the day as the judiciary offer themselves as stamps that authenticate sheer impositions of candidates in an intricate ring of conspiracy of the three arms of government.
It’s rather miraculous that we are yet to have a fragmented nation, dismembered due to ceaseless ethnicity and religious bigotry. It had been foreseen in some quarters that Nigeria would bow to the pressure of size and faulty leadership. Today’s strident clamours for restructuring, self-determination and true federalism lend credence to this view.
Because of the nation’s disrespect for record keeping, statistics, and even continuity in government policies, it is difficult to predict with mechanical precision the nation we might belong to in time to come. So, all we are able to conjecture are blurred visions. Yet, we cannot be very far from the picture, judging by the trend, if we say that the future is bleak. Nigeria goes back and forth in debts; loans used not for concrete developments but for consumption. While other nations are preparing to welcome electric cars and are building tunnels for fast trains, Nigeria is retracing cattle grazing routes and allowing other nationals to fight its citizens for the restoration cattle routes. Now, Rwanda, Ghana, South Africa, Singapore, Malaysia, Brazil and other nations that began the race with Nigeria has overtaken the so-called giant of Africa.
Nigeria once embarked on privatization of government businesses to entirely remove government from business, leaving the nation’s commerce and industry in the hands of the private sector as it is in developed nations. Another administration halted the move. Had the privatization been concluded, capital flight would have been minimized while the corruption rate would have reduced.
Technological growth is nothing to write home about. Dim pictures surround the nation’s indigenous technology. This is because certain phenomena that act as catalysts in a nation’s technology are absent in the country today. The overriding taste for foreign products among Nigerians has impeded, and would continue for a long time to impede the march to technological independence.
This preference for foreign goods, coupled with the inclination to trade liberalization among all nations, would hardly bring out the ingenuity of the Nigerian. Therefore, rather than bother about building indigenous planes, cars, electronics and other products arising from hi-Tech, the nation is importing and feeling complacent about it.
The bleak future is further compounded by the general fear whether there would be a united Nigeria in the future. All Nigeria has had are crashed visions and the race seems to be taking the pattern of two steps forward five steps backward. The pilots of the present democratic setting appear to lack the will and, by extension, the confidence of the masses, to take the country far into the future intact. The tendency of the present administration to swim in affluence with the nation’s commonwealth while the masses sacrifice in every aspect points to nothing else but doom.
At 64, disintegration stares the country in the face. Experts in nation building have conjectured that the woes of the nation may have been rooted in its birth. Nigeria, came into existence with birth defects inflicted on it by the British colonial midwives, who, by indications, have continued to encourage the imbecility of the nation because it gives them the room to go on with their raping spree on the hapless people of Nigeria.
Freed from the clutches of colonial masters, Nigeria has been a model of confusion. At this season of independence anniversary very few faces are smiling in the country. Critical stakeholders have called for restructuring and true federalism, recommending them as the pills that would save the soul of the nation no matter how bitter it might appear to be for some feudal lords in power. We must listen to these stakeholders. Happy 64th independence anniversary to the ever-sleeping giant of Africa.
Dr. Odu can be reached via dirimrich2018@gmail.com or SMS 07016722929