In 72 hours, Nigeria will be celebrating her 61st independence anniversary.
Nigeria became independent in 1960 in the middle of the rapid wave of decolonisation that swept the continent in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Since independence, the nation has become home to vast ambition and countless problems.
The country was barely two years old as a new-born state when she trembled violently in 1962. All those lofty hopes and expectations that the “giant of Africa” was born in 1960 to blaze a trail of ascendancy of black and African peoples began to fade so early.
Nigeria had hardly been weaned in 1962 when she began to flop dangerously to the utter shock of the world and Africa.
Hopes of a democratic future were still high when the first general election was held in 1964 but these were dashed with the first military coup in January 1966.
This led to a period of 13 years of military interregnum, which ended with the creation of the National Assembly, state governments and the federal presidency, all modelled after the U.S democracy.
Unfortunately, the biggest threat to national unity came in 1967 when the Nigerian civil war began.
Secessionists in the South East of Nigeria, dominated by the Igbo ethnic group, had declared the region the independent state of Biafra.
The roots of the conflicts in Nigeria are complicated but are connected to the events of 1966 ethnic tensions and control of the Niger Delta’s oil wealth.
The federal army eventually re-imposed control over the entire country but the 30-month war saw somewhere between one million and three million deaths.
This pathetic condition of national ill-health has been responsible for the diminished outlook Nigeria has today.
The country was appreciated in 1960 as an emerging black nation with one of the best potential for greatness, but more than 60 tragic years on, Nigeria seems to have wasted all her beautiful opportunities.
Today, in a global world where she is supposed to be a major player, the country can only be compared with some of the world’s least endowed countries.
In spite of her oil wealth, Nigeria is also one of the world’s poorest countries where over 80% of her citizens are in abject penury as they live on less than an American dollar a day.
Poverty has grown so exponentially that, in comparative terms, life in 1960, prior to her independence, was a lot more tolerable for most Nigerians than it is today.
There are still food shortages; the bulk of the population has limited access to medical services; vaccination scarcity stories mean that so many children are unprotected from dangerous diseases and too many people have poor access to potable water and wastewater services.
Like a toddler, Nigeria has been fumbling and wobbling so tragically that practically all her institutions and infrastructure have virtually collapsed as a result of crippling and endemic corruption that has virtually grown into a national identity.
“Poverty has grown so exponentially that, in comparative terms, life in 1960 prior to her independence was a lot more tolerable for most Nigerians than it is today”
The truth as of today is that Nigeria, which used to be regarded as a developing nation some 60 years ago, is now one of the world’s most under-developed nations struggling to stand on her feet, both of which are in paralysis.
Regrettably, Nigeria has certainly faced more than her fair share of security threats since 2000, with militant violence against the oil industry in the Niger Delta, Boko Haram terrorising and destabilising the North East since 2009, and the constant fighting between pastoralists and settled farmers, particularly in the centre and northern part of the country.
All these conflicts have been fuelled by economic injustice and low living standards among the bulk of the population. Yet despite all these challenges, predictions that Nigeria would collapse into pieces and experience yet another civil war have not been borne out.
Since 1960, Nigeria has continued to grope in her seemingly endless search for visionary leadership who would engineer credible and good governance as a result sham of elections.
From the parliamentary system employed in 1960 and which collapsed on January 15, 1966, to the executive presidential system which replaced it on October 1, 1979, it has been the same old story; a story of complex contradictions leading to failures of unimaginable proportions.
The period of rebellions came to an end in 1999 with the election of Olusegun Obasanjo as President on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party. Despite fluctuating political stability since then, fears of another military intervention have not materialised.
A deciding moment came in 2007 when Obasanjo stepped down as President after serving the constitutional maximum two terms of office and was replaced by late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. He was succeeded by his deputy, Goodluck Jonathan, who served as the President of Nigeria from 2010 to 2015.
Some steps were taken to test the water to see if the constitution could be changed to allow Obasanjo to run for a third term of office but the eventual outcome certainly strengthened the political process.
This improvement has been bolstered by the accepted political norm of alternating the Presidency between Northern and Southern leaders and the accompanying pattern of matching Northern Presidents with Southern Vice-Presidents and vice versa.
This has helped solidify North-South power-sharing, even within the same party.
Another positive progress was attained in 2015, when Muhammadu Buhari became the first-ever opposition candidate to become President, demonstrating that peaceful transfers of power are possible.
However, Nigerians are still asking whether this form of governance is best suited for this clime. The way of life of the Nigerian political elite is reflective of the colonial interlocutors. Same goes for taste, modus vivendi and modus operandi, so much so that what exists is a continuation of one form of exploitation or the other.
But even in the exploitation engendered by the colonialists, there was a semblance of co-ordination and organisation.
In Nigeria of today, that is missing. Worse, the cost of sustaining democracy is so massive that governance has been reduced to a regime of expenditure.
At 61, that there had been serious cases of needless failures in the past that make the call for celebration of any sort rather needless.
