By Babatunde Jose
I was 11 years old when the country attained independence on 1st October 1960. It was our year of ‘Great Expectation”. We had everything going for us as a nation and the future had great promise, not only for our parents but also for us who would later be described as ‘leaders of tomorrow except that tomorrow never came!
Here was a new nation stepping out of the colonial into the post-colonial, our fathers were stepping into the shoes of the Whiteman with all the paraphernalia of senior service. The nation’s diverse economy at the time was the envy of even the departing colonial master. We had the ubiquitous groundnut pyramids in the Northern Region, Cocoa in the West, Rubber, and oil palm in the East and of course, oil had been discovered at Oloibiri in the Niger Delta and the national coffers was bulging with cash. Of course, the marauders and state robbers have not perfected their acts and there was relative peace in the nation’s exchequer except for minor infractions here and there.
The proprietor of our school at Ikenne, late Dr Tai Solarin and some of his rebellious confederates were the first to give the first signal of a discordant tune with the new National Anthem. Mayflower students were made to adopt Solarin’s version of the National Anthem, ‘Hail Nigeria Glorious Land; Land of wealth and liberty. . . . . instead of the ‘Nigeria We Hail Thee. It was a sign that all will not be well. And it turned out that way.
Three years after independence, Western Nigeria was plunged into a political crisis that culminated in the imposition of Emergency Rule and finally a disputed election and the ‘operation wet’; an orgy of burning and looting and ultimately the January 1966 Coup. Our political advance was not only attenuated but truncated. Federalism which was the arrangement that started with the Sir Arthur Richards Constitution that divided the country into three regions of East, West and North, the tripod upon which our political development was hinged and which was developed upon by the Oliver Lyttleton Constitution, the London Constitutional Conference and the 1960 Constitution, was upturned by the ‘ Praetorian Guards’ of the Nigerian Army and a centralized militarist political command was instituted; an arrangement which subsists till today.
The paradise that independence promised was lost with the Civil War and its aftermath. Those of us who were in the Uni in the early seventies witnessed the best of Nigeria and its promise. Universities were well funded so much so that for what is peanuts today, students were well catered for. Hostels were akin to living in a ‘Bread and Breakfast’. Each hall of residence had its own cafeteria where food was plentiful and cheap. Halls had air-conditioned ‘cold rooms’ for studies and the hostels were well maintained: Beds were made, and laundry taken care of. Yes! In UI we had J’Rice and half chicken for lunch with ice cream on Sundays.
Most importantly, there was academic freedom and education was not with tears. The best brains were recruited as academic staff, and I believe, many will look back with nostalgia. Those were the days when final year students dreamt of the car, they would buy with their car-loan which was basic. Most came back to campus for the Convocation with their new cars, except those who went into farming. Companies would have visited the university to recruit before the end of the academic year. Most students had an idea what jobs they were taking up after graduation.
Unfortunately, that paradise was lost in the span of sixty-three years. Where did we go wrong? That is the question that has been begging for an answer.
As for our fathers, the promise was short-lived and by the evening of their lives, that dream became unfulfilled and until many of them died it was one lamentation after the other. My late father once quipped, ‘we never bargained for this turn of events’: That was after electricity became epileptic and the old people had to resort to buying traditional ‘abebe’ or native fan to fan themselves in the hot and humid afternoons. Though they had generators, it was a costly proposition that promised to wipe out their meager pensions. By the end of their lives, the cost of their Mercedes 200 in 1975 was not enough to buy 50 liters of diesel. I am sure many of us have stories to tell our children about how things have changed for the worse in our clime and how our expectations of a better life for our families have been truncated by the misrule and mismanagement of our God-given resources.
It is a shame that many of us who travelled abroad to study in the seventies were rushing home to join the train with high hopes of a bright future. NYSC, which started on the eve of our departure soon acquired the notorious acronym ‘National Youth Suffering Corps’. Meanwhile political development has ceased and in its place was ‘jackboot’ military authoritarian regimes, with a brief respite of civil rule that was soon overrun by the men in uniform. Yet, the world moved on and we started being left behind.
Dubai, the Gulf States, Singapore and the Asian Tigers, all became poster nations as we regressed into a state of underdevelopment and backwardness.
Our National Shipping Line, which boasted of new vessels, captained by our boys who had undergone training in the merchant marine were a pride to all and sundry. It used to be a thing of joy for those of us in London in those days when their ships berthed at Tilbury, and we went visiting and got jolly on board. Before we knew it, those vessels were gone with the wind in our national orgy of wreckage of the National economy.
The same fate befell our beloved Nigeria Airways which carried our flag to such diverse destinations as London, New York, Dubai and Jedda. Those were the ‘oun foloke’ era when our girls became international traders. Conduit Street in West London was ever bubbling with Nigerian passengers booking flights back home. Our friends and mates, who had trained at the School of Aviation, Zaria had become big boys in the airline industry and were respected all over the world for flying one of the largest and safest fleets in Africa. Alas, our national carrier too met its waterloo in the hands of our kamikaze rulers. The proud pilots and engineers were pensioned off into obscurity, never to be heard off again. That era was gone forever.
With the coming of the military and their tinkering with the structural arrangements of the country, our federalism assumed a unique flavor, distinct from any other ever witnessed in world politics. You might call it ‘unitary federalism’, a syncretism of federalism, devoid of fiscal separation; a federalism that is patterned along military centralized command structure; a federalism where the three legislative lists have assumed an obscurity to the extent of making nonsense of that arrangement, where the federal authority could determine the minimum wage in the federating units and at times meddle into the collection of waste. Students of political science would find it difficult to classify our system or create a taxonomy of the revenue formulae we are working on. The political system of post-independence and its economic superstructure have assumed witchcraft features that have refused to lend itself to a definition.
As a result of the dislocation and bifurcation, the immediate post-independence reliance on development planning had been jettisoned as a rule of the thumb approach to economic development. Several white elephant projects were started but never finished, while some never left the drawing board. These projects have been mentioned in our ‘Monuments of Waste’, in the past.
Because of the unwholesome attitude to economic management and the mismanagement and squandering of resources, our common patrimony has been frittered away and, where this has not been the case, the treasury had been looted and serially robbed.
The country’s population has increased exponentially since independence and without any commensurate increase in infrastructural and social development. The overall result is a glaring miserization, pauperization and impoverishment of the population.
We have since witnessed a regression into illiteracy with over 12 million children out of school. Even those that have attended school are half-baked and in many cases unemployable.
Suyi Ayodele, writing in the Nigerian Tribune: “Nigeria celebrated its 63 years of independence on Sunday, October 1, 2023. But Nigerians could not rejoice. Why? Every vital organ that the country needs to be able to do acrobatics for the 63rd anniversary of its nationhood has been harvested by bad governance that has been its lot since independence in 1960. The last eight years under General Muhammadu Buhari have been the worst ever in the checkered history of the nation. Unfortunately, the present administration of President Bola Tinubu appears to be the very one sent from the pit of hell to finally nail the coffin of the country. The agony of the people since May 29, 2023, when Tinubu assumed office remains a contender for a conspicuous space in the World’s Guinness Book of Records. From our lethargic executive to the comatose legislature and the amenable judiciary, Nigeria is on the reverse gear to the Stone Age.”
At independence there was a great revolution of rising expectation in the air and the future was very bright. Equally unfortunate too, that revolution of rising expectation turned out to be a revolution of rising frustration.
“Yet our leaders cannot perceive that a day will come when the people’s goat will be pushed to the wall, and it will turn back to attack its tormentors. The country is sitting precariously on a keg of gunpowder, yet our leaders are busy playing cards with boxes of matches, and we don’t want to believe that their nostrils have long been harvested!”- Suyi Ayodele
It is therefore correct to say Armageddon beckons!!!
Barka Juma’at and happy weekend.
