By Tony Okafor
At 66, Nigeria has at least one achievement to celebrate: we are still one country.
We have survived coups and counter-coups, a civil war, ethnic and religious crises, years of military rule, political upheavals, economic shocks and a relentless wave of insecurity. From 1960 till today, the federation has not broken. That is our strength.
But survival is not progress. Unity without a good life is an empty achievement.
This is the tragedy of Nigeria. We are not a country without resources; we are a country that has failed to convert its enormous human and natural wealth into a decent life for its citizens. Poverty deepens, jobs are scarce, electricity is irregular, roads are broken, hospitals are poorly equipped, schools struggle, and salaries often disappear before payday.
At the centre of this failure is corruption and poor leadership. Public office has too often become a route to private wealth. When money meant for roads, power, water, schools and hospitals is diverted into private pockets, ordinary Nigerians pay the price.
And Nigerians are remarkably patient people — suffering and smiling. We endure, improvise, hustle, pray and hope where others might have revolted.
So, at 66, we must ask a painful but honest question: If we cannot go forward, can we at least go backward?
Backward to when the naira had greater purchasing power. When a village teacher could, with savings and modest means, build a decent house because cement, roofing sheets and other building materials were affordable. When a worker’s salary could buy a bag of rice and still leave something for other necessities. When wages had meaning.
Backward to when the cost of living did not punish honest work. Today, many Nigerians work harder and live worse. That is not progress.
Backward, too, to when an oil-producing country could provide relatively affordable petrol, kerosene, cooking gas and other basic necessities to its citizens.
There is something fundamentally wrong when Nigeria spends years exporting crude oil while depending heavily on imported refined petroleum products, leaving citizens to bear the rising cost.
If we cannot go forward, let us at least recover the standards that once worked — when wages had purchasing power, and public schools and hospitals were institutions people could depend on rather than avoid.
This is not nostalgia for poverty. It is a demand to recover what we once got right.
At 66, Nigeria does not need more excuses, speeches or promises. It needs accountable leadership, functioning institutions, an electoral system that inspires confidence, a justice system that delivers justice, an economy that puts food on the table — and a Nigeria in which those who lived through the better years, before the darkness fell, would not one day be left to chorus, in Chinua Achebe’s haunting phrase, “There Was a Country.”
