63 years later, we chew on ashes

October 1, 1960 – 63 years ago today, opened up unusually vast opportunities and promises for Nigeria, a newly independent nation set to claim its seat among the comity of decolonised and freed people. Our national flag of green-white-green, symbolising agriculture and peace replaced the British Union jack on the flagpole. We smiled; we laughed; we rejoiced.

The burden of colonialism, an alien rule by aliens, had been lifted off our backs. We had become a free nation and free people. We, the natives of this vast piece of real estate, had become, by the simple but magical act of replacing one flag with another, the masters of our own destiny. We smiled; we laughed; we rejoiced.

Everything looked great; everything looked great and wonderful. Our leadership of the African continent was a given and we soon rose up to the challenges of continental decolonisation. Nigeria was the potential pride of Africa and the black race.

The great promises looked realistic and realisable. We were more numerous than any other black nation on earth. Eighty per cent of our vast country was arable land, able to support varieties of food and cash crops. We produced more groundnuts than other nation on earth; we produced more cocoa than any other nation on earth; we produced enough cotton to clothe half of the African continent; we produced more rubber than most countries put together; we produced more oil palm produce than any other nation on earth. Take a breath.

Just about the time the British were persuaded that leaving us alone to our own devices was a wise decision, their oil company struck the vein of hydrocarbon bearing crude oil. It was to define our national economy and make our country one of the wealthiest in the world. If you add crude oil to our vast agricultural endowments, you have a fair idea of what a great nation Nigeria was destined to become in the time takes to say Hausa/Fulani, Ibo, Yoruba.

Destined, yes. God is our witness. It has been 63 years today since the foreign flag came down and our national flag went up. It has been 63 years since we took the destiny of our dear country into our hands as our political leaders put their shoulders to the plough to build a new nation from the ashes of colonial exploitation of our agricultural and mineral resources.

In our 63 years of independence, our country made the leap from an agrarian economy to a crude oil economy that altered the trajectory of our national development. But it has been a tortious journey for the nation. The noon failed to deliver on the promises of the morning. Nigeria’s greatness has been arrested; its greatness still remains potential. All has not been well for our country. Politics has widened existing fault lines and opened new veins of separatism. We have witnessed our rise towards the top of the mountain only to see us sink back into the valley.

And so, 63 years later, we are not celebrating our greatness. We are celebrating what TheGuardian newspaper captured in its frontpage headline of its independence anniversary issue of Friday, September 29, 2023: Tales of woe, missed opportunities, unmet expectations 63 years on.

It bears repeating: missed opportunities; unmet expectations. We failed our nation, and we failed the promises of independence. We are still the most populous black nation in the world, but we are also the poorest nation in the world. Our arable land has been turned from verdant green into the brown colour of agricultural neglect; we cannot feed ourselves and so we depend on smaller nations in South-East Asia to feed us; we import palm produce from Malaysia; we have lost our advantage in cocoa production and the cocoa farmers are forgotten species; the cotton production zones of the country such as Gusau in what is now Zamfara State, are abject and empty agricultural land; the groundnut pyramids, once the pride of Kano province, have turned fact into fiction.

To cap it all, we are a debtor nation with close to 80 trillion Naira debt burden. We are in want because we squandered our enormous oil earnings. Part of our problem can be blamed on a new, intractable disease that entered into how we manage our affairs. We call it corruption; we call it cankerworm. Our soldiers invited themselves to the battlefield to help eradicate it because they believed that the bloody civilians who, according to the late Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, wallowed in it, could not battle it, let alone eradicate it. The soldiers came and soon found out that corruption operates on the principle of equal opportunities for opportunistic exploiters.

Yes, in the past 63 years our nation has done great in many respects. Our academicians, athletes and footballers ensure that our nation is not missing from the map of the world. Our businessmen and women have done us proud too. We have witnessed the emergence of billionaires and countless millionaires. The richest African, Aliko Dangote, is a Nigerian. We have more private jets than the other 53 African countries put together. Private mansions in our towns and cities tell the story of a people who have made it and are in the big league. The irony is that while individual Nigerians are wealthy, the country that birthed them is nearly as poor as Haiti. We live with the big contradictions of rich but poor nation, of wealthy citizens but a struggling nation with 158 million citizens living below the poverty line.

For 63 years, we have contended with forces that have always sought to tear us apart. Almost everything went wrong from the beginning and the centre barely held. Our politics of regionalism saw the three colonial-minted regions in conflict with themselves. Our major fault lines of tribalism and religion papered over during our long years of colonialism turned us into an atomistic nation. We fought a 30-month civil war to remain as one nation tied to one destiny. We emerged from it not stronger but weakened by tribal interests that define our politics and cut-throat political competitions.

Our failures are not for wanting of trying. We have responded to political and ethnic domination by redrawing the geo-political map of the country from three regions to four regions to twelve states, to 19 states to 21 states to 30 states and to the current 36 states. To ensure that everyone is given a chance to feed from the collective feeding bowl, we instituted the quota system, the Federal Character Commission, and the constitutional stipulation that the executive council of the federation must reflect the composition of the geo-political units. Our military politicians turned our country into a petri dish for all manners of economic, social, and political experiments. That is what you do when you are searching for answers in Sokoto while it sits smugly in your sokoto.

The rest of the world verily believes that honesty is in short supply in our country. The green passport was once a revered document throughout the world. Now, it is about the most suspicious document in the world. It is tainted with drug trafficking, and it is tainted with corrupt practices. We lost our leadership on the continent because we failed to maintain the position we attained and instead shrunk below our size. Our loud voice in the affairs of Africa is now at the small level with the voice of a mouse. We have watched as our politicians systematically poisoned everything we should hold dear, including the systematic erosion of the integrity of the judiciary and turned it from a refugee for the unprotected into a citadel for the protected.

We did not just miss opportunities, we also missed our soul as a nation. We did not just fail to meet our collective expectations, we also employed corruption and greed to squander our enormous riches. Tales of woe?  Country hard.