The Southerner
OPEN EYES
Today, October 1st, 2026, Nigeria marks sixty-six years since the Union Jack was lowered and the green-white-green was raised over Tafawa Balewa Square in 1960. It is a day for remembrance, but also for reckoning. A nation that only celebrates without examining itself is rehearsing self-deception.
At sixty-six, a man is nearing the end of his productive years; a nation, however, is expected to be in its prime. Nigeria, endowed with oil, fertile land, solid minerals and the largest concentration of Black talents on earth, should be leading the continent and entire black race. Instead, we gather once more to ask why the giant of Africa still walks with a limp.
It would be dishonest to pretend that the colonial project was without lasting contributions, even though its motives were extractive. Britain bequeathed the amalgamated territory we call Nigeria, a civil service framework, a parliamentary tradition, a common law system, and the English language, which today binds over 250 ethnic groups in commerce and governance. It laid railway lines from Lagos to Kano and Port Harcourt to Maiduguri, built ports at Apapa and Port Harcourt, established institutions like Yaba College, King’s College and Government College Umuahia, and left behind a disciplined culture of record-keeping, town planning and public service.
These were not acts of charity, but they were foundations. The question was never whether they served colonial interests, but what an independent and self-respecting people would build upon them.
Sadly, what we built upon them was neglect. The Nigerian Railway Corporation, once the arterial backbone of a thriving economy, carrying cocoa, groundnuts, palm produce, cotton and coal, was left to rot for decades under successive governments. Tracks were buried in weeds, locomotives became scrap, and thousands of workers were retired without dues.
The Lagos-Ibadan and Abuja-Kaduna revivals came only after generations of waste, and even then they came wrapped in foreign loans and political acrobatics. Ajaokuta Steel Company, conceived to industrialize the nation, has become a monument to corruption, rusting for over four decades after billions were sunk into it. A country that cannot maintain what it inherrited has no moral basis to boast about what it has built.
Again, the decay extends to every institution we were handed. Nigeria Airways is dead. Our refineries, built with public funds, have spent years as objects of turnaround maintenance contracts that enriched contractors while the nation imported the petrol it should have refined. One should not make a mistake of believing that Dangote Refinery alone, as well conceived as it is, will be enough for the needs of 250million Nigerians.
Public universities once attracted scholars from across Africa; today they are shadows of their past, and their best lecturers jakpa in droves. Our hospitals have become departure lounges for medical tourism by the same elites who starved them of funding. Military and civilian regimes alike, from the coups of 1966 to the democratic dispensation since 1999, bear this guilt equally. Khaki or agbada, the pattern of looting, abandonment and impunity has been bipartisan.
Then comes the favourite alibi and scapegostism; blame the white man for our shortcomigs! Sixty-six years after independence, too many of our leaders still recite the grievances of colonial rule as a substitute for good governance. Yes, neo-colonialism is real: unfair trade terms, exploitative resource contracts, debt traps, and foreign interests that profit from our dependence. But who signs those contracts? Who stashes stolen billions in London, Dubai and Geneva? Who sends their children to foreign schools and flies abroad for a headache?
Colonialism ended in 1960; the colonizers who remain today are the ones living in Aso Rock, in state government houses, and in the National Assembly. Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea were also colonized and devastated, yet they took responsibility and rose. We can no longer blame Lord Lugard for the failure of the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s or the 2010s. Those were Nigerian hands on Nigerian levers.
Instructively, we must lament the death of pan-Nigerianism and the disappearance of political role models. Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, built a modern Northern Region with schools, scholarships and institutions while preserving its identity. Chief Obafemi Awolowo introduced free primary education and pioneered the first television station in Africa, proving that vision could be turned into policy. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe used the pen and the pulpit to awaken a continent and gave a young country its first indigenous president. They disagreed fiercely, but each held a national vision and left little personal fortune. T
oday’s crop too often sees office as a private estate, amassing generational wealth for unborn descendants while the living starve. Little wonder our schools rarely hold up contemporary leaders as examples for the young. You cannot teach integrity with a textbook whose latest chapters are scandals. A generation is growing up with heroes drawn from the past and cynicism about the present. That is a dangerous inherritance!
Yet, to hope is not naivety; it is a decision. In twenty years from today, by 2046, Nigeria can be a different country if we act with discipline now. We must restructure governance so that resources and responsibility are better aligned, strengthening states and local governments with real accountability. We must make elections credible, genuine independence for INEC and swift prosecution of vote-buying and other related electoral offences. We must fund and protect anti-corruption institutions from political interferrence, and make looting costly. We must invest in science and technology, technical education, agriculture, rail and power, not as slogans but as budget lines monitored by citizens. We must guarantee security of life and property, because no investor or farmer thrives under fear.
- Above all, we must rebuild civic character; young Nigerians must vote, organize, monitor budgets and be allowed to run for offices even if they are not from wealthy homes. That can only be done when politics is reduced to a non-lucrative venture! The founding fathers handed our current rulers a country; it falls to them to hand the next generation a nation. Happy Independence, Nigeria. Let us stop celebrating survival and begin demanding excellence. May the sun rise tomorrow.
