It is no longer history that on October 1, 1960, Nigeria became an independent and sovereign nation. Sixty-six years later, we celebrate another Independence Day not merely as a ritual of flags, parades and patriotic speeches, but as an opportunity for sober national interrogation.
The big question we should be asking as we celebrate this survival is, whether Nigeria has fulfilled the promises of its independence?
For a country endowed with enormous mineralresources, fertile land, an exceptional human population, extraordinary entrepreneurial energy, intellectual capacity and cultural influence across the world, our story ought to be one of transformation.
Instead, too often, it has been a story of ill squandered opportunities, institutional weakness, avoidable poverty, insecurity, corruption, political misdirection and leadership that has frequently placed the interests of the few above the welfare of the many.
While it is not yet Uhuru, it is certainly not an obituary for Nigeria. It is a call to national responsibility.
While I must acknowledge with profound commendation that, political independence was a monumental achievement. On October 1, 1960, the Union Jack was lowered and Nigeria assumed responsibility for her own political destiny.
The constitutional arrangement provided for a federal system, with substantial responsibilities vested in the regions.
But independence was only the beginning.
The deeper meaning of independence should have been the gradual liberation of Nigerians from poverty, ignorance, disease, insecurity, discrimination and arbitrary power.
A nation cannot be said to have achieved the full promise of independence merely because its citizens elect their own leaders. Political sovereignty without economic opportunity can become independence in name but dependence in substance.
The tragedy is that Nigeria has often and ritually changed the occupants of political offices without sufficiently changing the character of governance.
It is common to blame every Nigerian problem on leadership but Nigeria’s difficulties have also been influenced by colonial legacies, military interventions, civil conflict, global economic conditions, population growth, institutional weaknesses and social divisions.
Nevertheless, leadership matters enormously.
Leadership determines whether public resources are converted into public goods. It determines whether institutions are strengthened or weakened. It determines whether citizens receive justice or merely promises.
For over six decades, Nigeria has struggled with a political culture in which public office can be treated as an avenue for patronage rather than a constitutional trust. This is fundamentally a legal and moral problem.
The Nigerian Constitution does not conceive government as the private property of those who occupy public office. Government exists for the welfare of the people. Public authority carries corresponding duties.
When public institutions become instruments for distributing political favours, when appointments are driven predominantly by loyalty rather than competence, when public procurement becomes vulnerable to manipulation, and when accountability is selective, democracy is reduced to periodic elections rather than a culture of responsible government.
The problem, therefore, is not simply that Nigeria has had bad leaders. The deeper problem is that we have repeatedly tolerated systems capable of producing and protecting bad governance.
Poverty in a land of abundance.
Perhaps nowhere is the contradiction of Nigeria more painful than in the persistence of poverty.
The World Bank’s recent assessments show the scale of the challenge. Its 2025 Poverty and Equity Brief estimated that 41.8% of Nigerians were living in extreme poverty under the $3-a-day international poverty line in 2022/23. It also recorded substantial regional differences, with poverty considerably higher in the northern zone than in the southern zone.
More recent World Bank analysis estimates that more than 60% of Nigerians were living below Nigeria’s national poverty line in 2025, while inflation and weak real income growth continued to place pressure on households.
Behind these statistics are human beings.
The mother who cannot afford school fees. The graduate who has spent over ten years searching for meaningful employment. The farmer who cannot safely reach his farm. The entrepreneur whose business is crippled by unreliable electricity, poor infrastructure and expensive credit.
The civil servant whose salary disappears under the weight of food, transportation and housing costs. The child who grows up believing that leaving Nigeria (Jakpa) is the only realistic path to a better future.
Poverty is therefore not merely an economic statistic.
It is a question of human dignity.
Our greatest resource is not oil.
For decades, Nigeria behaved as though petroleum were the destination rather than a means to development.
Oil and other natural resources should have financed the transformation of our human capital, transportation networks, electricity generation, healthcare, education, agriculture and industrial capacity.
Instead, the country’s dependence on petroleum revenues contributed to a political economy in which control of the state became extraordinarily valuable.
We must now move beyond the psychology of the oil economy.
Nigeria’s most valuable resource is not beneath the ground. It is the Nigerian person.
Our young population, scientists, lawyers, engineers, doctors, artisans, farmers, entrepreneurs, artists, technology professionals and millions of ordinary citizens possess enormous productive capacity.
The challenge is to build a state that enables that capacity rather than suffocating it.
Perhaps one of Nigeria’s greatest problems is misdirection.
We spend enormous energy fighting over ethnicity, religion, political parties, personalities and geographical entitlement while fundamental questions remain unresolved:
Where are the jobs?
Why is electricity still unreliable?
Why does a country with enormous agricultural potential import so much food?
Why do citizens struggle to obtain quality healthcare?
Why is education increasingly inaccessible to poor families?
Why do businesses spend so much money generating their own electricity?
Why does insecurity prevent citizens from freely farming, travelling and conducting legitimate businesses?
Why are public institutions frequently perceived as serving political interests rather than the public interest?
These are the questions that should dominate our national conversation.
But political elites can and do benefit from a distracted population.
A citizen preoccupied with whether the president, governor or legislator belongs to his ethnic group may fail to ask whether that public official is delivering measurable results.
Ethnicity should not become a substitute for accountability. Religion should not become a shield against scrutiny. Party loyalty should not become an excuse for incompetence.
Nigeria needs citizens who can love their ethnic and religious identities while simultaneously demanding competence and accountability from everyone who governs them.
Nigerian crisis cannot be separated from the weakness of institutions.
A constitutional democracy requires more than a written constitution. It requires institutions capable of enforcing constitutional principles consistently.
The rule of law means that the powerful and powerless are subject to the same legal order.
It means that government must act within the limits of its lawful authority.
It means that courts must be sufficiently independent to protect citizens.
It means that public officers must understand that political power is temporary but institutional responsibility is permanent.
It means that accountability cannot depend upon who is involved.
A functioning democracy cannot be built around personalities.
Institutions must become stronger than individuals.
When institutions work, even a mediocre leader is constrained by the system. When institutions fail, even good intentions can be overwhelmed by patronage, impunity and vested interests.
Leadership failure does not absolve citizens of responsibility.
We cannot condemn corruption in government while celebrating it when it benefits us personally.
We cannot demand accountability from politicians while selling our votes.
We cannot complain about bad roads while illegally obstructing public infrastructure.
We cannot demand the rule of law while selectively defending lawlessness committed by people from our ethnic or political camp.
We cannot build a new Nigeria solely by changing presidents.
Nation-building is a reciprocal obligation between government and citizens.
Citizens must demand better government, but citizens must also become better participants in democracy.
So, what is the way forward?
At 66, Nigeria does not need another grand slogan but institutional seriousness.
We must rebuild institutions.
The civil service, judiciary, electoral institutions, security agencies and regulatory bodies must operate with greater professionalism, independence and accountability.
We must make economic production the centre of national policy.
Nigeria needs an economy in which businesses can produce, farmers can farm safely, manufacturers can compete and young people can obtain meaningful employment.
The World Bank notes that about 3.5 million people enter Nigeria’s labour force annually, underscoring the enormous employment challenge facing the country.
Education must become a national emergency.
Education is not simply another budgetary item. It is the foundation upon which a modern state is built.
A country that fails to educate its young population eventually pays for that failure through unemployment, insecurity, social instability and lost productivity.
Nigeria must decentralise opportunity:
A federation should not function as though every meaningful economic opportunity must originate from Abuja.
States and local governments must have greater capacity and responsibility to develop their economies, while the federal government concentrates on matters genuinely requiring national coordination.
We must confront corruption through institutions rather than selective outrage.
Anti-corruption efforts must not become weapons used only against political opponents.
The objective should be a system in which stealing public money is difficult, detection is likely, prosecution is credible and punishment is predictable.
We must stop confusing consumption with development.
Government should increasingly be judged by outcomes.
How many jobs were created?
How much electricity became available?
How many children received quality education?
How many kilometres of productive roads were built?
How many Nigerians moved out of poverty?
How much private investment was attracted?
How much public money was saved through transparent procurement?
These are better measures of governance than the number of political rallies held or the length of speeches delivered.
The Nigeria of our dreams cannot be built by government alone.
It requires lawyers who defend justice even when inconvenient.
Journalists who investigate without becoming political instruments.
Judges who protect the Constitution without fear or favour.
Business people who understand that wealth creation and social responsibility are not enemies.
Religious leaders who preach integrity alongside faith.
Traditional institutions that promote peace rather than political division.
Academics who speak truth to power.
Young people who understand that citizenship is more than social-media activism.
And politicians who understand that public office is a trust, not an entitlement.
At 66, Nigeria should not surrender to cynicism.
Yes, we have failed in many respects.
Yes, poverty remains painfully widespread.
Yes, corruption and institutional weakness remain serious challenges.
Yes, insecurity continues to undermine lives and livelihoods.
But failure is not destiny.
The same country that has produced extraordinary lawyers, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, scholars, artists, athletes and technology innovators can produce institutions worthy of those people.
The same young Nigerians who are changing industries across the world can transform the country if the Nigerian state creates the conditions for them to thrive at home.
We must become independent of bad governance.
Independent of political impunity.
Independent of ethnic manipulation.
Independent of poverty as a permanent condition.
Independent of the mentality that public office is an opportunity for personal enrichment.
Independent of the belief that Nigeria’s problems are always somebody else’s fault.
And independent of the dangerous idea that nothing can change.
At 66, the question should therefore not simply be, “What has Nigeria done for us?”
We should ask a harder question:
“What kind of Nigeria are we prepared to build—and what are we prepared to sacrifice to build it?”
The answer must be a country where the law means something, where leadership is accountable, where hard work can produce dignity, where poverty is an enemy to be defeated rather than a population to be managed, and where citizenship is not determined by ethnicity, religion or political affiliation.
While I say Happy Independence Day, Nigeria.
I pray that “May the green-white-green flag one day represent not merely the memory of freedom, but the lived reality of justice, prosperity, security and dignity for every Nigerian”.
And not a country that reminds me that, my father and my two brothers became victims of a failed state.
Ka kon Challa shak.
