As Nigeria marks her 49th independence anniversary today, the gloom of unfulfilled expectations is yet to lift. It is yet another painful reminder of a country’s failure to optimally use its abundant human and natural resources.
Today is also a reminder that it is high time we sat down to truthfully and realistically decide the way forward. This is important because Nigeria will be 50 next year. Fifty years is a milestone in the life of any man or woman. It is the age of super maturity when most hard-working people had attained lofty heights in life. Using this analogy, Nigeria has indeed come of age.
At independence, Nigeria had the potentials of a great nation. The geographical spread of cash crops such as palm produce, cocoa, groundnut and other vital export earnings in different regions of the country led many observers to be optimistic about the country’s economic growth. But after the oil boom in the 1970s, all the efforts at boosting food production were abandoned.
Nigeria became a mono-culture economy whose fortunes only revolved around oil. Oil boom became our doom. This misfortune coupled with the dangerous incursion of the military into politics, and the attendant problems of corruption, greed, and lust for power have robbed Nigeria of its speedy growth.
Therefore beyond the usual independence rhetoric and good wishes, lamentations about our failed dreams and missed opportunities, we need to ask our ourselves today a few fundamental questions: Where are we going? How do we get to our destination? What does the future hold for us and our children?
The right answers to these questions will determine what the future has in stock for the country. Taking refuge in wishful thinking compounds the problems. We have to be truthful to ourselves. We must come to terms with the hometruth that the first development process is to fix primary infrastructure-in education, health, energy, transportation, communication etc – which is key to the development processes.
Barely a week after independence in 1960, Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa declared on the floor of the United Nations that political independence without concomitant economic security is completely inadequate. Painfully, over the years we have seen how the poor economic development of the country has threatened political harmony, peaceful co-existence in the country and increasingly fuelled poverty and crises.
The most painful aspect is that while Nigeria, a country so richly endowed with human and natural resources, is sinking day after day, other less-endowed countries including neighbouring African countries are making giant strides in political and economic development.
Therefore, Nigeria needs urgent redemption. Our founding fathers had hoped for a better post-independent Nigeria. But that hope seems to have been dashed today. Many of the problems which we encountered at independence are still staring us in the face today. The poverty in the land is still pervasive. While the few rich people at the top get richer, majority of the poor at the bottom get poorer. The middle class has virtually disappeared.
Virtually all the sectors of the economy are in a state of coma at the moment. There is a complete darkness in the land. With the collapse of the education sector, Nigerian students are fleeing to even Ghana and other countries in search of good education. The general insecurity of lives in the country today is scary. There is corruption, monumental corruption, in all aspects of our national life.