A Nation’s Mid-life Crisis

NEWS UPDATE: Two bomb blasts rocked Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja this afternoon killing at least 16 persons, close to the Eagle Square venue of the Country’s golden jubilee celebrations. Police officials say up to 30 people were injured in the explosions that have been claimed by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).

MEND is a militant group that claims to be committed to fighting the exploitation and oppression of the people of the oil-rich Niger Delta where collusion between the Federal Government of Nigeria and neo-colonial corporations has left the communities devasted through years of oil spills and environmental degradation amid stupendous resources used in the extraction of oil in the area. The group had issued a warning to Police authorities two hours prior to the explosions in the nation’s capital where President Goodluck Jonathan commended the Police for their work in securing the safe release in the early hours of this morning of 15 school children who were abducted earlier this week.  The children were released without payment of the 20 million Naira (USD 150,000) ransom demanded by the gunmen who hijacked their school bus in the Southeastern city of Aba. Vice President Goodluck Jonathan took the reigns of power after the death of President Umar Yar’Adua in May. Jonathan, who recently declared his intention to run in the April 2011 elections condoled with the families of the victims and has vowed to bring the culprits of this afternoon’s attack on the nation’s capital to the book.

 OPINION

Nigeria turns fifty today. To say the country is going through a mid-life crisis is to suggest that after years of stability, the nation suddenly ran into troubled waters. It is however a historical fact that while America has been described as a country which went from infancy to senility without passing through a period of maturity, Nigeria is a case of arrested development. Like a mentally challenged child, the country has to be taught the same elementary tasks over and over again while its erstwhile contemporaries move on to master more advanced skills.

To explain why there is so much poverty in Nigeria compared with other oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia, post-independence leaders often refer to the nation’s population as the culprit. The reasoning behind this argument is that there are far too many people competing for their nation’s resources. What these political apologists fail to mention however is that without crude oil revenues a nation like India has done far better for its people despite a population ten times that of Nigeria.

Another frequent line of argument of those who would have us believe that the nation is not doing too badly has been to cite Nigeria’s age. They say it is unfair to compare the country with the West, after all, the United States they say, gained its independence more than two centuries ago. However once again using India’s development as a yardstick, that country is just 13 years older than Nigeria yet as at 13 years ago, India was manufacturing its own cars, ships and diesel engines.

But enough talk about Asian and American countries. A fair assessment of Nigeria’s progress should be made in comparison with other countries on the African continent. Top of the class in this category is undoubtedly South Africa which has a Gross National Product (GNP) several times that of Nigeria. In the education sector, while there are a handful of South African institutions on the list on the world’s top 200 universities, none of Nigeria’s 70+ tertiary institutions are on the list.

Where does Nigeria go from here? What goals should she set herself for the next 50 years? Modest aspirations might be called for. The fellow West African nation of Ghana made history recently by electing a president from a different political party from that of the incumbent. Now an achievement of that order would really be worth celebrating in Nigeria.

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