There was a time when Nigeria’s problem was said to be too much money. General Yakubu Gowon, the young soldier who held the country together through a civil war, is widely remembered for declaring, “Money is not our problem, but how to spend it.”
Whatever the exact setting of those words, they captured an era of confidence, when the naira traded at less than one to the dollar and oil earnings were pouring in. Today the same naira is measured at approximately 1,400 against that same dollar, and the nation that once struggled to find enough uses for its wealth cannot find enough wealth to feed its people.
We did not lose tomorrow in one dramatic moment. Our ‘Tomorrow’ as a nation died yesterday, slowly, in budget padding, in abandoned projects, and in every promise buried before it could be kept.
It is more painful still when we look at those who started the race beside us. In the 1960s and 1970s, Nigeria was counted among the emerging economies alongside Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Indonesia, and its per capita income was in the same category as several of them.
Malaysia even took its early oil palm knowledge and stock from West Africa and built one of the world’s largest palm oil industries, while Nigeria, once a leading exporter, now imports cooking oil.
Singapore’s income per person is now well over 80,000 dollars a year, South Korea and Taiwan sit around 30,000 to 35,000 dollars, and Malaysia is above 10,000, while Nigeria’s is barely a thousand after the naira’s collapse. What they did different was that they planned, invested in education and industry, punished corruption, and kept their eyes on the future, while we kept our eyes on the next sharing formula.
Consider what everyday life once looked like. A respected elder statesman told me recently that as a young NYSC corps member in the 1970s, he was flown by helicopter to his place of primary assignment.
He also boarded flights from Lagos to Borno for social events. He was no rich man’s son. It was simply affordable, because Nigeria Airways and a functioning economy made the sky accessible to ordinary graduates and civil servants.
Now the same air travel has become a luxury, and Nigeria Airways is long dead. Today a civil servant earning the 70,000 naira minimum wage struggles even to afford road transport from Port Harcourt to Abuja, let alone a flight ticket from Benin to Sokoto.
A nation that once let a young graduate fly to a wedding now forces its workers to choose between transport fare and dinner.
Let us be honest about how we arrived here, because this collapse did not pop out of nowhere. It is the accumulated result of decades of bad governance, from millitary regimes that looted and from civilian governments that promised reform and delivered excuses.
The PDP governed for sixteen years, from 1999 to 2015, and the APC has governed ever since. Through both eras, refineries decayed while we exported crude and imported petrol, electricity generation stagnated at a few thousand megawatts for over 200 million people, and oil earnings vanished into leakages and subsidies that enriched a few.
The true measure of a failed state is the depth of poverty its citizens are forced to endure. Nigeria’s own statistics bureau reported in 2022 that about 63 percent of Nigerians, some 133 million people, were multidimensionally poor. You and I know that these figures are not as harsh as the reality.
If the government could place poverty level at 63%, then be assured that it is already at the alarming rate of 80%! If these woes are not addressed with immediate effect, the angry rhetoric of the opposition will find a home in the mind of the ordinary Nigerian who cannot afford one meal a day, and hunger does not check anyone’s manifesto.
It does not recognize tomorrow. Hunger only reckons with immediate practical attention!
Moving forward, as the elections draw nearer, Nigerians must not be carried away by fine speeches and promises of politicians building bridges even where there is no water. Many of today’s loudest opposition voices were yesterday’s governors, ministers, senators and party chieftains, in the very ruling parties that shaped this decay.
Being in opposition today does not automatically exonerate anyone from the legacy they built when they held power. As patriotic citizens, we should be able to ask every politician plainly: what did you build, which state did you transform, which project did you finish, what did you say when things went wrong? A politician who preaches change now must show the change he or she delivered then.
Fairness would be for us all to Judge every candidate, in government or out of it, by the record and not the rhetoric, because a saint who was silent in the cathedral of power is still a witness to its sins.
Again, as always, the way out is possible, because Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea proved that nations can be rebuilt within a generation. We must fix power and refining so that industry can breathe, make transparent oil revenue accounting a matter of law, and prosecute grand corruption without regard to party, religious or ethnic affiliations.
We must invest in agriculture and agro-processing, and in security so that farmers can return to their fields. We must rebuild rail, roads and domestic aviation so that mobility is affordable again, and make education and technical skills the centerpiece of national planning.
Most of all, we must vote for competence and character, not tribe, religion, party or stomach infrastructure.
The Nigeria my elders described was real, and it was affordable, and it flew. Tomorrow died yesterday, but a generation with the courage to demand accountability can still resurrect it. May the sun not stop shining!
