Random Thoughts
By Tony Eke
GREETINGS on a day like this!
It ought to be a special day. So it was in the good bygone years. Then, we looked forward to this day with enthusiasm. Even on its eve, some compatriots embarked on a volitional vigil, as the clock ticked to usher in the most significant day. For a good reason then, Nigerians immersed themselves in the mirthful moment.
Today, the land is in a disquiet, eerily silent with the pathetic voices of a people forced into annual lamentations of Freedom Day gone awry. The category of citizens that bestrides the space as emerging lights in governance circles seems not too bothered, unlike the rest of us agitated by the continual plaintive narratives of national regression.
Is Nigeria’s independence so good? Has independence transformed Nigeria into a nation 60 years later? I
don’t think so. The indices of a free country are hardly there. The most noticeable is a lack of shared sense of nationhood across the land, given the proclivity of citizens to ethnic identity rather than embracing the bigger picture as Nigerians.
Sixty-five years after the so-called flag independence, there are more Nigerians in the poverty cycle than we had in 1960. Political governance reeks of selfish inclination instead of the altruistic perspective that drives the same model in working democratic polities. We cannot celebrate independence when successive administrations unabashedly watch the erosion of the state’s dominant power while non-state actors seize swathes of the country’s space and impose their reprehensible will on hapless citizens.
Can a country be deemed that free when the people in whom sovereignty resides are denied freedom to elect leaders they have confidence in?
Nigeria suffers from perpetual mismanagement by poor leadership thrown up by ethno-regional advantages rather than competence dictated by enviable antecedents. In its wobbly state induced by cyclical stagnation, Nigeria’s future is bleak, and it would hardly develop in its present configuration. The earlier it’s constitutionally restructured to promote fiscal federalism, or alternatively liquidated to birth five or six independent republics, the better for us.
