As the drums roll for another Independence Day, I wounder and ask, what six decades of self rule have truly delivered.
On Thursday, the drums will roll again. The President will appear on television with that familiar, weary cadence, urging us to keep hope alive because our founding fathers laboured for this Nation. Governors will cut cakes in their state capitals. School Children will march under the scorching sun, waving little flags whose meaning they barely grasp. The police band will play, radio stations will shout “Happy Independence!”, and the green-white-green will dance proudly in the wind. Yet behind all the fanfare lies a silent cry in the heart of every ordinary Nigerian that no anthem can drown.
I write not as a member of any political party, nor as an admirer of any candidate, but as a wounded citizen; a Nigerian simply tired of pretending that all is well. I write with tears in my eyes and fire in my chest, because some truths must be told before we dance. When the music fades and you return to a kitchen with no light, to a filling station whose pump price you cannot afford, to yet another headline of kidnapping and hunger, you will be forced to ask the question that burns like pepper in the throat: Are we truly free?
It has been 66 years since the Union Jack was lowered at the Race Course in Lagos. We must ask, with brutal sincerity, what we really gained.
The British left our shores, but did they truly leave our minds? They handed us a flag and an anthem, but they also handed power to an elite that had studied the art of colonisation all too well, and has since perfected it against its own brothers and sisters. The exploitation no longer comes in an English accent. It comes in Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and pidgin, from our own sons and daughters, and that is why the pain cuts deeper. The white master is gone, but he left behind a younger brother, and that younger brother is our ruling class.
Colonisation did not end; it merely changed colour. Yesterday, it was a man in London siphoning our palm oil and groundnuts. Today, it is a man in Abuja siphoning our oil billions and stashing them in Dubai and London. Yesterday, the colonialist told us we were unfit to govern ourselves. Today, our own leaders tell us, through their actions, that we are unfit to enjoy good roads, decent hospitals and quality schools. What, then, is the difference? The chain is still locked around our ankle; only the hand holding it has changed.
Let us call it what it is, We have failed. Not in one sector or two, but across the board. I say this with a heavy heart and an anger no editor can dilute. The acclaimed Giant of Africa now limps like a dwarf, watching smaller Nations sprint past while we struggle to stand. It was not always so.
In 1960, groundnut pyramids rose over Kano like monuments to Northern enterprise. Cocoa money in the West paid for free primary education, Cocoa House and the first television station in Africa. Palm oil made the East prosperous. We were the pride and hope of the continent. My father used to tell me that in the sixties and seventies, a Nigerian student abroad was respected. Our naira was worth more than the dollar, we gave scholarships to students from other African Nations, we led peacekeeping missions, and when Nigeria spoke, the world listened. The story is often told that Malaysia came to Nigeria for palm seedlings and to learn how to cultivate palm oil. Today, Malaysia is one of the world’s largest exporters of palm oil, while we import it. It is like a man who owns a river yet begs his neighbour for a cup of water.
When crude was discovered in Oloibiri in 1956, it should have been a blessing. Instead, it became a curse, not because oil is evil, but because it made our leaders lazy. They abandoned the farms and the factories and began sharing oil revenue in Abuja every month like national cake. Whoever found his way to the table ate to excess, while the rest of the nation licked the plate.
Begin with Education, the foundation of any free nation. What have we done with it?
At independence, University College, Ibadan, was a college of the University of London, and its graduates held their own anywhere in the world. Great secondary schools such as Barewa College, Christ the King College and Government College Ibadan produced leaders who shaped Africa and commanded respect across the globe. That system gave us Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. Today, it is a shadow of itself. Today, our public schools lie in ruins. Children sit on bare floors, writing on their laps. Our universities have become strike centres. A young Nigerian gains admission at 18 and may graduate at 28, not because he is dull, but because government and ASUU are locked in endless battles over funds that politicians loot without remorse. In 2022 alone, students sat at home for eight months, and in that idleness some drifted into Yahoo Yahoo, others into crime, for an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Lecturers are owed salaries, Laboratories lack equipments, Libraries still parade books from 1975. Meanwhile, the children of ministers and the rich are in Toronto, Manchester and Houston, posting graduation photos online, while the children of the poor roast corn by the roadside, still waiting for a degree that may never come.
Tell me, is this what Zik and Awo fought for? We have murdered the future inside the classroom. The privileged return with foreign accents to rule over the very children left behind to waste away. We have built two Nigerias, one for the rich and one for the poor, and the bridge between them has collapsed. The colonialist deliberately gave us an inferior education to keep us as clerks. What excuse do we have for what we are giving ourselves today?
Go to our Hospitals and see what independence has delivered. A nation of more than 220 million people cannot boast of a single public hospital where its own President would be treated with confidence. In general hospitals from Lagos to Makurdi, a woman in labour is asked to bring her own gloves, her own disinfectant, even her own blood, before anyone attends to her. Meanwhile, at the slightest headache, our leaders fly to London, Berlin or Washington, spending public funds to heal themselves abroad while the hospitals they were elected to build are left to rot. Under colonial rule, University College Hospital, Ibadan, was built, and Nigerians benefited, even if almost by accident. Decades after independence, and after hundreds of billions of dollars in oil earnings, our leaders cannot build one world class hospital for themselves, let alone for us. If this is not a colonised mind compounded by callousness, what is it?
Consider Security, the first duty of any government. How can a country with an Army, a Navy and an Air force, and trillions of naira budgeted for defence every year, fail to protect its own children? From Sambisa to Zamfara, from the forests of the North West to the creeks of the South, blood flows daily. Farmers in Benue cannot go to their farms without fear. Travellers on the Abuja–Kaduna highway say their last prayers before setting out. Students are carried away from their dormitories in the dead of night like chickens. Freedom of movement, the most basic proof of independence, has been stolen from us.
And when these tragedies occur, what do we hear? “We condemn this barbaric act”, “We are on top of the situation.”. Empty grammar, and no solution. The blood of innocent Nigerians cries out daily while the powerful hide behind high walls guarded by policemen. Our soldiers are brave, but too often they confront terrorists with inferior weapons, while money meant for arms vanishes in Abuja offices, as the arms procurement scandals of recent years made painfully clear. A man who cannot sleep with both eyes closed in his own country is not independent. He is a prisoner in his fatherland.
Talk of the Economy, and the shame deepens. For decades, one of Africa’s biggest crude producers imported nearly all the petrol it consumed. Only recently has a private refinery begun to change that picture, while our state refineries, after trillions of naira spent on so called turn around maintenance, still sputter and stall. Fuel subsidy was removed and the poor were told to sacrifice, yet the powerful never sacrificed their convoys, their private jets or their mansions in Dubai. Petrol that sold for under two hundred naira a litre in early 2023 now costs several times that. The naira, once stronger than the dollar, has become a shadow of itself, and a minimum wage of seventy thousand naira barely buys a bag of rice. Is this not madness?
Our Power sector is a national embarrassment. After privatisation and after billions spent, the national grid still struggles to deliver much more than 5,000 megawatts to over 220 million people, and it collapses so often that its failures barely make headlines anymore. South Africa, with about 63 million people, has an installed capacity above 40,000 megawatts. Even Ghana next door enjoys steadier electricity. Our welders, hairdressers, tailors and small business owners are suffocating between the cost of diesel and the silence of the grid. Darkness has become our national identity.
What of our Roads and infrastructure? The reconstruction of the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway took about a decade. The Abuja–Kaduna road remains a death trap. The East–West Road in the Niger Delta, the very region that produces our oil wealth, is an embarrassment. Every year, floods wash away villages in Kogi, Anambra and Borno; officials arrive with cameras, distribute wrappers and disappear. We could not maintain what the colonialists left behind, let alone build a new. Our railways were left to rot for decades before we began borrowing from China to rebuild what we once had.
Our Judiciary, our Civil service and our Electoral system have all been polluted. Justice too often goes to the highest bidder. The poor man who steals a goat spends three years in prison; the big man accused of stealing three billion naira arrives in court fresh from his private jet and secures bail within minutes.
Some will argue that we now have democracy and can vote. But how free is that vote? Every four years, politicians share rice and a few thousand naira to buy our future. Thugs snatch ballot boxes. Results are written in hotel rooms. Young people who dare to speak are brutalised, as the EndSARS protests of 2020 reminded us, or dismissed as lazy. The system is designed to recycle the same faces, from military uniform to flowing agbada. And we, driven by hunger and ethnic sentiment, sell our votes and then lament for four years. No wonder turnout keeps falling; many have simply lost faith. Can you blame them?
The most painful part is that we have normalised suffering. We now thank God for things that should be ordinary. “Thank God NEPA brought light for two hours today,” we say, as if electricity were a miracle. “Thank God I found fuel,” as if fuel were a luxury in an oil producing nation. We celebrate a governor for building one road, as though building roads were not his job. The colonial mentality lingers. We worship those in power as if they are doing us a favour, when in truth they are our servants. We have been conditioned to accept crumbs. Until we free our minds from tribalism and stomach infrastructure, we will remain slaves to politicians.
Nigeria today is a giant in chains. We were hailed as Africa’s largest economy, yet we were also named the poverty capital of the world. We produce crude oil but queue for petrol. We have rivers, yet our taps are dry. We have sunshine all year, yet we live in darkness. Our brightest minds, doctors, nurses and engineers, are joining the japa wave in their thousands. Our airports have become places of tears, where parents wave goodbye to children they may not see for years. Our green passport draws suspicion at foreign embassies, and we are too often known for fraud rather than excellence, because the system frustrates the honest and rewards the corrupt. This is not freedom. This is a slow national burial.
Yet the anger of the ordinary Nigerian is not about tribe or religion. The hunger in the belly of an almajiri child in Sokoto is the same hunger felt by a street child in Port Harcourt. The tears of a Christian mother whose child has been kidnapped are the same tears shed by a Muslim mother in identical anguish. Our pain is one. Our enemy is not one another; our enemy is bad leadership and our own silence.
To all presidential hopefuls now touring the country, from the ruling party to the opposition, listen and listen well. Nigeria is not a company to be looted. Nigeria is not a throne to be inherited. Nigeria is a mother weeping for her children. If you truly seek to lead, put Nigeria first: not your ambition, not your party, not your pocket. Stop treating the presidency as a retirement benefit or a mission of revenge. It is a sacred trust.
To the incumbent, and to all who seek to replace him, I ask in plain language; when you promise Renewed Hope, or promise to rescue us from it, do you feel the hopelessness of a father in Kano who cannot afford a bag of rice? When you speak of economic reform on television, do you understand the pain of a widow in Aba whose shop has closed because diesel is beyond her reach? When you boast of security gains, have you sat with mothers in Benue who have buried their sons, or with parents in Kaduna who sold everything to ransom their children? If you have not felt our pain, you are not prepared to heal it.
We appeal to you to do better, not as politicians, but as human beings. Do better than empty promises. Do better than sharing money during campaigns and sharing hunger after elections. Do better than seeking medical care abroad while our general hospitals become mortuaries. Do better than sending your children to Harvard and Oxford while our universities shut their gates and our children learn under trees. If you cannot build a Nigeria where your own children can be treated in a Nigerian hospital and educated in a Nigerian university, you have no moral right to ask for our votes.
Even in this sadness, I refuse to give up on Nigeria. I see the resilience of our people. I see the market woman who still smiles despite her losses. I see the okada rider who toils from dawn to dusk to feed his family honestly. I see young Nigerians building apps in Yaba, farming in Nasarawa and producing films in Asaba that the world applauds. There is a spirit in us that colonisation could not kill, that military rule could not crush, and that bad governance has failed to extinguish.
To every struggling Nigerian reading this at a news stand, on a phone, in a shop or in an office; hold on, your suffering is seen, your anger is valid. But let us convert this frustration into action. The next election is not far off. Let us not sell our conscience again. Let us not be divided by tribe and religion again. Let us ask every candidate, what is your plan for my child’s education, for my mother’s health, for my security, for my job? Let us vote with our hearts and our heads, not with our stomachs.
To the candidates, history is watching. Years from now, what will your children say about you? Will they say you were among those who finally set Nigeria free, or among those who kept her in chains? Put Nigeria first. Build one Nation where a child from the North and a child from the South have equal opportunity. Unite us with truth, not with lies.
One day, Nigeria go better. I believe it with all my heart. But that day will not come by wishing alone. It will come when we, the people, decide that we are truly ready to be free, not only from the British, but from corruption, tribalism, fear, poverty and hunger. Until then, our independence remains incomplete, and our celebration a painful reminder of what might have been.
So let this season be more than a celebration. Let it be a reckoning. Nigeria will rise again.
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