Nigeria celebrates the 49 years of her independence from Her Majesty’s government of Great Britain in 1960.On that day, foreign Colonialists were replaced by our own home-grown colonialists who promised us paradise on earth. Whether the Proverbial Paradise on Earth has been delivered or not depends on which side of the divide one belongs. Some have cause to celebrate Nigeria’s Independence with our leaders. Some, the majority, have no cause to celebrate at all. Those who have held Nigeria hostage for the past 49 years and plundered her God-given resources can afford to celebrate their conquest, like an Army of Occupation that had just shared the loot of a conquered territory. Those who took over from the British Colonialists suffered from Independence Post Partum Syndrome. Instead of consolidating on what the British left behind, they were busy conniving to share and carved the nation up to satisfy their individual and collective mercantile interests.

The crises they engineered and sustained in the then Western Region dragged on till 1966 when they were overthrown by the band of Idealistic Majors in the Nigerian Army who took power but do not know what to do with it. The baton of rulership, since then had been exchanged between the Military and Civilian predators, who to all intent and purposes, did not and do not have the interest of the Nation at the back of their minds, collectively. Nigerians have since realized that our leaders are criminal packs bent on easy loot.

Nigerians have been made wiser by the chicanery of our leaders to have realized that anything, no matter how painful to the citizenry, can be done by our leaders to increase their individual power. They are so proud of what they are accomplishing and are not at all bashful about showing off. That is why some of them are planning to foist Umar Musa Yar’Adua on Nigerians for another term of four years, even if after two years, his government is yet to accomplish anything tangible than waving the flag of due process.

Nigerians are now being accused of being impatient with our leaders. We are now being told to reschedule our political and economic expectations like a train being diverted from one track to another at the whims and caprices of our leaders. Nigeria has now been gradually turned into a land where the people and the leaders are implacable enemies.

Nigeria has now been turned into the largest importer of Electrical Power Generators because of her size and the fact that subsequent government since 1986 do not have answers to improve upon the Electricity Infrastructure that was put in place during the First Republic. This is in spite of billions of Naira that are yearly budgeted for provision of Electricity that has been found to be the very germane to industrial development. Warehouses are being converted to religious edifices and other sundry uses and some Multi-National Companies have shifted their operations to our neighbouring countries that are not bedeviled by corruption and where the cost of doing business are relatively conducive to doing business.

The spectre of kidnapping of highly government officials, spouses and family members of legislators is no more news worthy. This sad development would not have elicited nervousness in an average citizen, but poor people are not also being targeted by the criminal citizen, but poor people are now also being targeted by the criminal elements, who in Ebonyi State were reported to have demanded for a ransom money as low as Ten Thousand Naira. Nigerians now live each day with the eager trust of a believer in good fortune that tomorrow may bring. Nigerians are now being exhorted to labour merely to exist, to spin away our lives just to stay alive. Those righteous men and women in our midst labour had earned them pensions are not being paid and some even died on the queue waiting to be paid. Those lucky to have been paid are also fleeced by the Banks through the instrumentality of newly introduced device known as Automated Teller Machine (ATM).

If experience teaches anything at all, it is the ability to hold or harbour disparate views in a polity and one posits that the problems confronting Nigeria and that have turned her to an adult still sucking from the feeding bottle at 49 years old can not and should not be understood in black and white but in more subtle shadings of grey. Put differently, it is one’s belief that the Conservatives (both of Civilian and Military hue), at least for the future generation of Nigerians, born and yet unborn, should allow the country to grow and develop.

Leaders in other climes, Singapore and/or Ghana have poignantly demonstrated that a Nation’s development can be fast tracked if the leaders are determined and focused to make a difference. It is rather unfortunate that the present Federal Government of Nigeria is wandering in a landscape of the past, which the contemporary and objective reality of political, economic and social situation hardly impinged.

According to Richard Hooker “change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better” – Ecclesiastics Polity.

Leadership should not only be by example but by precepts. Democracy is like a mirror. It gives back what it sees. If it sees a great visionary, thinking and humane citizenry, it turns up great, visionary, thinking and humane leaders; that is, if they are allowed to freely choose their leaders! Most of those in power presently have been around all along or hare protégés of those who castrated the country but will not let go and nothing has changed. The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer. It saddens one to no end when people who are supposed to provide succour to the flagging spirit of an averaging Nigerian, are spewing out nonsensical effusions to the effect that Nigeria has improved considerably compared with what obtained during the First Republic simply because a Governor a Governor like Sule Lamido can now drive from Kano to Dutse with relative ease. Nigerians have realized, albeit, with regret and nostalgia that, they have been short-changed by the emergent political leaders. Nigerians have realized that the road to the political El-Dorado promised us by our leaders are still light miles away. Our leaders have feasted on the past as a means of dieting with the truth in the present.

If the fortunes of an average Nigerian and by extension, that of Nigeria have not been improved for nearly fifty years; if Nigerians are daily witnessing poverty on an unprecedented scale; if an average Nigerian is watching hopelessly the face-off between the Academic Staff Union of Universities that have kept our public universities shut for nearly four months and our children in these institutions idle; if an average Nigerian is watching his/her avaricious, Godless and paracitic leaders (of whatever hue) mismanage resources found in his/her backyard; if an average Nigerian is prevented from savouring the end-product of his/her freewill and choice, with regards to who leads him/her through outright brigandage and brinkmanship, rigging of elections and annulment of elections, he/she does not need to be a student of Hobbes to know that things have gone awry and may not change for a long time so long as the Power Mongers are on the driver’s seat of the vehicle of development.

Successive Governments in Nigeria have turned the country into a woman of 49 years of age, fully grown physically but with a mind of three-year old baby lustily thirsting for her LACTOGEN baby food in the feeding bottle. Nigerians are tired of lies and double standard as they are tired of poverty.

Most of our leaders are filled with self-righteousness and virtue, but like misers, they would not spend out of it, for the benefit of their people. Our leaders now equate and see politics as the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

In spite of these anomalies, the incurable optimist in this writer still believes that the future of this country will still be bright. How it will come about? Only providence and our collective efforts will deliver us. Happy Celebration, my dear country as I have no other country I want to call my own.