Nigeria At 66: The Country We Each Carry

Femi Akintunde-Johnson

On every Independence Day, Nigeria becomes a country of many countries. The flag is the same green and white, the national anthem is supposed to stir the same patriotic blood, and the public holiday arrives with the same official photographs, speeches and familiar exhortations about unity. Yet somewhere between the ceremonial parade and the roadside breakfast, Nigerians are experiencing entirely different versions of the country.

Ask the civil servant what October 1 means and you may get a sigh before an answer. Another public holiday? Perhaps. A moment of national pride? Certainly, for some. But if salary has been delayed, rent is due, school fees are knocking and the price of food has performed another Olympic sprint, patriotism can become an expensive luxury. The worker may love Nigeria and still wonder why loving one’s country appears to require such extraordinary personal sacrifice.

The petty trader has a more immediate constitution. Her Nigeria is measured in tomatoes, transport fares, daily sales, customer bargaining and the mysterious ability of ₦10,000 to disappear before lunchtime. She does not need an economic summit to know what inflation means. The entrepreneur understands it differently: access to credit, electricity, taxation, regulation, logistics, multiple levies and the exhausting business of surviving a system that can sometimes behave as though enterprise itself is an offence requiring several permits and three queues.

 The bus driver and conductor know another Nigeria. They navigate potholes, traffic, police stops, fuel prices, impatient passengers and the mathematics of making enough money before the vehicle’s next mechanical crisis. Their patriotism has a steering wheel. The mechanic, meanwhile, has discovered that Nigerians may complain about everything except the price of keeping an old vehicle alive. He knows the nation’s automotive graveyard intimately – and has made a profession of resurrecting what common sense might have buried.

The young tech entrepreneur inhabits yet another republic. His Nigeria may be frustrating, but it is also a place of enormous possibility. He sees global markets through a laptop, creates products for customers thousands of kilometres away and wonders why his country can produce world-class coders, designers and digital entrepreneurs while still struggling to provide reliable infrastructure for them. The undergraduate is somewhere between aspiration and anxiety, asking whether the certificate at the end of the journey will lead to employment or merely qualify him to join the unemployment queue.

For the recently unemployed, Independence Day can be painfully ironic. There is little independence in depending on relatives, friends and former colleagues for survival. The jobless graduate may have the degree, the NYSC certificate, the CV and several unanswered applications. He has heard repeatedly that Nigeria’s youth are the future. At some point, he may reasonably wonder whether the future has forgotten his address.

The medical doctor sees the country from the opposite end of the life-and-death equation. She works through overcrowded facilities, resource constraints and long hours, sometimes contemplating emigration while caring for patients who cannot afford the alternatives. The journalist, meanwhile, tries to tell the country’s story while navigating commercial pressures, political sensitivities, misinformation, online abuse and the increasingly strange expectation that truth should be both instant and convenient.

Then there are Nigerians whose lives polite society prefers not to discuss. The sex worker may regard Independence Day with the same practical calculation as any other working day: customers, safety, income and survival. The scrap scavenger is searching through the material remains of somebody else’s consumption, converting discarded metal, plastic and electronic components into food money. The policeman may be guarding people who distrust him, while carrying the burden of a profession in which one bad encounter can define the public’s opinion of thousands of others. The bricklayer is literally building the Nigeria in which the rest of us will live, even if the country has never quite figured out how to build a secure future for him.

The sportsman or woman knows another dimension of national identity. Put a Nigerian athlete in national colours and suddenly millions who spend ordinary days quarrelling over ethnicity, religion and politics remember that they belong to the same place. Victory can produce an astonishing national unity. Defeat can produce another familiar Nigerian response: somebody must be blamed. We are, after all, a nation that can turn a football match into a constitutional crisis.

And then there is the politician, whose Nigeria is perhaps the most complicated of all. For him or her, Independence Day is simultaneously a national celebration, a political stage and an opportunity for patriotic vocabulary. There will be speeches about sacrifice, unity, development and the greatness of Nigeria. These are all perfectly respectable words. The public’s difficulty is that Nigerians have heard many of them for 66 years and are increasingly interested in the distance between the speech and the street.

This is the strange beauty and burden of the Nigerian experiment: there is no single Nigeria. There is the Nigeria of the presidential villa and the Nigeria of the roadside kiosk. The Nigeria of the boardroom and the Nigeria of the motor park. The Nigeria of the private hospital and the Nigeria of the public clinic. The Nigeria of the luxury apartment and the Nigeria of the crowded room where several people sleep under one leaking roof.

Yet they are not separate countries. They are competing experiences of the same country.

 Since 1960, we have stumbled through coups and civil war, military rule and democratic experiments, oil booms and economic crises, structural adjustment and privatisation, population explosions and technological revolutions. We have enjoyed moments of remarkable achievement and endured periods of bewildering failure. We have built universities, hospitals, industries, roads, airports and institutions – and sometimes watched them deteriorate because maintenance seems to be regarded as an optional sequel to construction.

We have missed opportunities that now look almost criminal in retrospect. Oil wealth that could have transformed generations was squandered through corruption, waste, poor planning and misplaced priorities. We have repeatedly announced grand plans, launched ambitious programmes and created committees whose reports probably now constitute a small endangered species of Nigerian literature. And yet, remarkably, Nigeria persists.

The petty trader opens her stall. The driver starts his engine. The doctor returns to the ward. The journalist files the story. The mechanic reaches for his spanner. The entrepreneur tries again. The graduate sends another application. The scavenger pushes his cart. The athlete trains. The student studies. The policeman reports for duty. The mother calculates what can be cooked with what remains. Millions continue to construct private solutions to public problems.

This resilience is admirable. But it can also become dangerous if we romanticise it. A country should not have to depend indefinitely on the extraordinary resilience of ordinary people to compensate for the ordinary failure of extraordinary institutions.

At 66, perhaps that is the most honest way to look at Nigeria. Not as the magnificent country of official speeches, nor the hopeless disaster of permanent cynicism. We are something more complicated: a vast, unfinished experiment populated by people who have endured far more than they should have had to endure and still somehow manage to hope.

That hope may be Nigeria’s greatest asset. It is also our greatest accusation against ourselves. Because every Independence Day, Nigerians demonstrate that they have not given up on the country. The question is whether the country – its leaders, institutions and political class – will eventually give them sufficient reason not to.

At 66, we are still here. But being here was never supposed to be the whole achievement. Independence was supposed to be the beginning of what we could become.