Anniversaries force us to think, and at sixty-six, Nigeria needs thinking more than celebration. This essay is for the Nigerian who still believes, despite the news, that the promise of 1960 can still be saved. It is not a cry, and it is not praise. It is an honest look at where we have been, where we are, and where we must go if the work of our heroes past will not be wasted.
When the British flag was lowered and the green-white-green was raised at the Race Course in Lagos on 1 October 1960, there was music, joy, and real hope that Africa’s largest country would show Africa how to be free. The crowd that cheered Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa did not just celebrate the end of white rule, they celebrated a promise. Sixty-six years later, that promise has been tested and broken at times, but it has refused to die.
The past was a time of greatness and big mistakes, but we do not tell the full story. We rightly remember Azikiwe, Awolowo and Balewa, but we rarely mention the market women who taxed themselves to fund parties, or women like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and Margaret Ekpo who mobilised women across regions. That forgetting started a pattern that still hurts us today, with one of the lowest numbers of women in parliament in Africa.
The early years were supported by farm produce and a parliamentary system based on the Independence Constitution of 1960, a federal agreement reached through talks. That is different from the 1999 Constitution we use today, which was imposed by soldiers. The First National Development Plan from 1962 to 1968 was driven by the regions and showed what good planning could do, before the civil war from 1967 to 1970 broke the idea that unity could be taken for granted.
The oil boom that came after taught us a bad lesson. It made us depend on crude oil, made waste normal, and made military rule look routine. We also removed history from schools and raised a generation that knows how to trade but does not know how we became a country.
The present is more complicated than oil and politics. On paper, Nigeria is still a giant, Africa’s largest democracy and its biggest cultural exporter through Nollywood and Afrobeats. In tech hubs in Yaba, farms in Kebbi, and workshops in Aba, you see hard work that no government can claim. Yet this private hard work exists inside weak government, where power is still epileptic, factories run on diesel, and manufacturing has fallen from over 10 percent of GDP in the 1980s to under 5 percent today.
Insecurity has also changed from civil war to banditry, insurgency and kidnapping. The judiciary, which should protect independence, suffers from long trials and selective obedience to court orders, and this is weakening public trust.
Our economy shows another puzzle. Crude still brings most foreign money, but money sent home by Nigerians abroad, over twenty billion dollars in good years, now rivals oil and keeps millions of families alive. We trained doctors now in Manchester, engineers in Toronto, lecturers in Texas, yet we deny them the vote and mock those who left as japa.
We also borrow badly. We now spend more money paying debts than we spend on schools and hospitals combined because we borrow to spend, not to build. Subsidy removal was needed, but it was done without cheap transport, so it pushed millions deeper into poverty. And while we argue about tribe, a bigger danger grows, over 20 million children out of school, the highest in the world, a time bomb worse than any insurgency.
Two other bills are due. The environmental bill: oil pollution still spoils Ogoniland, gas is still flared in the Delta while families hunt for firewood, desert moves in eleven northern states, and illegal mining scars Zamfara and Osun. The creative bill: Afrobeats now fills stadiums from London to Atlanta, but our copyright system is weak, royalties are stolen, and piracy thrives. If we cannot protect ideas, we will lose the one area where we lead without oil.
Even sports, which once united us, now shows the rot. Athletes pay their way to the Olympics and local league players are owed months of salaries, yet we still expect unity from football. Perhaps the clearest sign of a new Nigeria was EndSARS in 2020. For two weeks, young Nigerians organised without tribe or godfather, providing food, security, medical care, legal aid and clear accounts. It was a glimpse of a state that serves.
That generation, whose median age is seventeen, now builds billion-dollar tech firms and wins Grammys, yet at home teachers are paid thirty thousand naira. They have proved Nigerians are not the problem.
The future, if it will be different, must plan for size. By 2050 we will be the third most populous country on earth with over three hundred million people. A country that large cannot run on generators and improvisation. Lagos alone has over seventeen million people with less than one in ten connected to formal sewage. That is a disaster waiting to happen, and we need mass housing, rail, water, broadband and planned cities.
Second, we must make federalism real. That means state policing to fight banditry that central police cannot contain, resource control that lets states develop solid minerals and pay royalties, and a revenue formula that rewards production not just population. Local government must stop being a Supreme Court judgment and become reality, with funds and elections governors cannot pocket. Electoral reform must also go beyond BVAS and IReV to punishment, because until vote-buying and violence carry real jail time, technology is decoration.
Third, we must treat our people as security. Schools must have teachers, hospitals must have doctors, and farming must mean machines and storage not just hoes. We need an emergency plan for out-of-school children and for girl-child education in the North, because no country grows with half its people locked out. We lead in fintech and agritech today, but without steady light, cheap data, strong data protection and stable policy, we will keep exporting talent and importing products. Tax reform must be fair, bringing more people in instead of punishing the few who already pay.
Finally, we must regain respect abroad. We once led peacekeeping in Liberia and Sierra Leone and stood against apartheid. We cannot lead ECOWAS or the African Union when our own elections are questioned and our moral voice is weak.
In the end, Nigeria’s story is not tragedy or triumph, it is a work in progress. The past gave us a flag and an anthem but also an imposed constitution and an incomplete history. The present has shown that oil alone cannot build a nation, that citizens can succeed despite the state, and that young people can organise without tribal permission. The future will not be saved by slogans or by just changing governments, but by building systems that outlive them, systems that plan for three hundred million people, protect ideas, protect the environment, welcome the diaspora, and enforce the law equally.
The green-white-green that rose in 1960 still flies, faded by sun and rain, but it still flies. The question for this generation is whether the giant will finally learn to walk with purpose, with justice, and with the discipline that true independence demands.
Fẹ́mi Akínṣọlá is a public policy analyst and development writer based in Ibadan.
