The Southerner
OPEN EYES

There is an African proverb that warns us not to throw away the bathwater with the child. It speaks to a wisdom every nation must learn; that in our justified anger at what is broken, we must not discard what is precious and growing. Nigeria today is a country of loud complaints, and many of them are valid. Insecurity, inflation, unreliable power and uneven governance weigh heavily on citizens.

Yet a nation is not judged only by where it falls short of its dreams, but also by how far it has travelled from where it began. When Nigeria gained independence on 1 October 1960, it was a young federation of roughly 45 million people, with a handful of universities, very few paved roads and a thin layer of trained professionals. To ignore the distance covered since then is to throw out the child with the bathwater.

Consider first the human capital we have built ever since. At independence, Nigeria had only a few degree-awarding institutions, with University College Ibadan, established in 1948, the lone pioneer before the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Ahmadu Bello University, the University of Ife and the University of Lagos arrived in the early 1960s.

Today, the country has well over two hundred universities, alongside polytechnics, colleges of education and a growing number of specialized institutions. Literacy has risen substantially from the low levels of the independence era. Nigerian professionals now lead in hospitals, laboratories, courtrooms, banks, technology firms and universities across the world.

The Nigerian diaspora is among the most educated in the United States and the United Kingdom, a quiet testimony to the quality of the minds this country produces.

Further, our economic and infrastructural progress, though uneven, is real. Nigeria is today Africa’s largest economy by many measures and home to the continent’s largest population, with over 220 million people.

The telecommunications revolution that began in 2001, when GSM services were launched, took us from a country where a telephone line was a luxury for the privileged few to one with well over a hundred million active mobile lines today. Nigerian fintech companies have produced homegrown “unicorns” and made the country a leading hub for digital innovation in Africa.
The Dangote Refinery, one of the largest single-train refineries in the world, signals the potential of Nigerian enterprise.

Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt have expanded dramatically, with new rail lines, bridges, airports and seaports changing the physical landscape. Our creative industries, from Afrobeats to Nollywood, now command global audiences and have made the green-white-green a cultural brand admired on every continent.

To count a few, nothing is more significant than the fact that Nigeria is the largest black democracy on earth. Our road to this point was not smooth. We endured a civil war from 1967 to 1970, and long years of millitary rule that interrupted our growth and silenced our voices. But since 1999, Nigeria has sustained an unbroken democratic dispensation, now more than a quarter of a century old, the longest in our history.

Power has changed hands between parties at the federal level, including the historic 2015 transition in which an incumbent president conceded defeat and an opposition candidate took office peacefully. Our courts, our press, our civil society and our electoral institutions remain imperfect, but they are more open and more resilient than at any time before.

Many nations with greater resources have failed to protect their democracy. Nigeria, with all its complexity, has kept faith with its own, and that deserves applause.

But the greatest asset Nigeria can ever possess is not oil, population or territory. It is unity of purpose. We are a nation of more than 250 ethnic groups and several faiths, and our diversity can be either our strength or our undoing. At the moment, our rich diversity is our undoing! A nation cannot flourish when its citizens see themselves first as northerners or southerners, first as Muslims or Christians, and only last as Nigerians.

Last week, I emphasized in my article that “the founding fathers of our nation, men like Azikiwe, Awolowo, Balewa and Sardauna, had their differences, yet they shared a dream of a great and united country”. Our daily interactions already tell the better story; we share markets, schools, workplaces, football stadiums, marriages and friendships across every line our politicians try to draw.

When each of us chooses “Nigerian” as our first identity, Nigeria will finally have citizens she can proudly call her own rather than the current state of occupancy that is the case.

To the young Nigerian who is tired, discouraged or tempted to believe that all hope is lost, hear this; the failures of today’s leaders do not cancel the promise of this nation. Many of the leaders of yesterday dreamed of a Nigeria that today’s leaders have yet to deliver, but dreams do not die with the dreamers; they are inherrited.

We are the inherritors. It is our civic duties to demand accountability, vote with conviction, build with integrity, and refuse to let frustration become surrender. Our pace has been slower than it should be, but we are still moving, and a nation that is moving can be steered.

Let us pour out the dirty bathwater of corruption, tribalism and indifference, and hold on tightly to the child: a resilient, gifted, democratic Nigeria whose best chapters are still unwritten. May the sun rise tomorrow.