Nigeria @ 58 From Promise to Despair, the Story of a Nation that Lost Direction

As the nation marks another independence anniversary tomorrow, Samuel Ajayi traces the implosion of the country right from independence and why a nation once seen in the league of Asian tigers has remained comatose in terms of growth and arrested developm

Tomorrow, the first of October 2018, the ritual will take place again. It is another independence anniversary and day of speeches across the country. From the Aso Rock Presidential Villa to State Government Houses, it will be a day of back slapping and, in some cases, cutting of the independence cake. Tomorrow will make it fifty-eight years since the nation attained self-rule, when the Union Jack was lowered and the green and white colours of the newly independent nation were lifted up.

At independence, the nation had three regions that had more or less semiautonomous powers. These were West, East and Northern Regions. Though even at these early stages of the nation’s life, there were already frictions as the Northern Region was bigger than the two other regions combined. But this did not stop their growth. Since there was no crude oil, the North relied on groundnuts, the West on Cocoa and the Eest on coal, rubber and oil palm.

Seeing the need to invest on education, the Eastern Regional government established the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1960 while the Northern Region established the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in 1962, while the Western Region established the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University, IleIfe) same 1962.

The regions also embarked on massive social programmes aimed at elevating the quality of life. These programmes included building of hospitals, opening up rural areas and provision of electricity across their respective regions. The three regional capitals-Ibadan (West), Kaduna (North) and Enugu (East)-also witnessed transformations which were aimed at making them compete with other regional capitals, if not in the world, but at least in Africa.

While the political set-up of the nation, after independence, was such that the regions were setting the pace in terms of development, the crisis engendered by the 1964 elections actually sounded the death knell of the First Republic and set the country on a path of retrogressing that it has not recovered till today.

The regional elections, of that year, saw the ruling party at the centre, Northern People’s Congress, NPC, exploiting the friction in the ruling party in the Western Region, Action Group, AG, to enthrone an unpopular government in the region. After losing the 1959 elections, the leader of the AG, Obafemi Awolowo, had chosen to reject the idea of a unity government with the NPC which won