By Kune Nimi Igoni

As Nigeria celebrates its 66th Independence Anniversary.

Suppose Nigeria were given an unusual opportunity. Not another independence, not another republic, not another military intervention, and certainly not another committee with sitting allowances, hotel accommodation, foreign study tours and twelve months to submit a report that everybody knows will eventually occupy a government shelf. Suppose we were simply allowed to start again. Not from 1960, but from everything sixty-six years have taught us. What would we do differently?

Perhaps we would begin by admitting that Nigeria cannot continue to run mainly as a sharing arrangement. For too long, one of the most dependable economic activities of government has been waiting for money to arrive from Abuja. States gather around the Federation Account, allocations are distributed, governors return home, salaries are paid where possible, contracts are awarded, press releases are issued, and everybody prepares for the next allocation. We have created a federation in which too many governments behave like adult children who have married and had children of their own but still telephone their father at the end of every month for pocket money.

If we were starting again, states would have stronger reasons to produce. Kano would think seriously about agriculture, leather, manufacturing and commerce. Lagos would deepen trade, finance, services, and industry. Niger Delta states would look beyond crude oil towards gas, petrochemicals, fisheries, maritime industries, agriculture, and tourism. The South-East would build further on manufacturing, technology, and enterprise, while the Middle Belt would develop its enormous agricultural potential. Every part of Nigeria possesses something besides a governor, a government house, and a monthly allocation.

This would not mean abandoning national solidarity. Wealthier parts of a federation should support weaker ones, and national resources must serve national purposes. But there is a difference between sharing wealth and organising an economy around sharing. A governor should know not only what Abuja sent last month, but also what the state produced, what it exported, how many businesses opened, how many jobs were created and how much new wealth was generated. Otherwise, we are not really running thirty-six economies; we are operating thirty-six branches of the same national collection office.

We would also redesign local government to mean what the name suggests: government that is local. A Nigerian living in a village should not have to rely on Abuja to solve the drainage problem outside his house. Councils should maintain local roads, markets, sanitation, primary services, and community infrastructure, with clear revenues and equally clear accountability. Nigerians should know their councillors for something other than campaign posters and condolence visits.

Then we would finally settle the electricity matter. The generator has served Nigeria loyally enough. It has attended weddings, powered hospitals, preserved frozen chicken, operated factories, charged phones, illuminated churches, and mosques, and probably contributed more consistently to national development than several agencies with headquarters in Abuja. After decades of faithful service, the generator deserves a national honour, a pension, and a peaceful retirement.

Reliable electricity would transform almost everything else. The barber would reduce his operating costs. The welder could work without listening for the generator to cough. The cold-room operator could calculate the price of fish without first calculating diesel costs. Hospitals could operate equipment reliably. Manufacturers could compete. Students could read without treating their battery percentage as an academic subject. Electricity would cease to be an event, and nobody would need to shout, “Up NEPA!” because something already expected had unexpectedly happened.

We would use our enormous gas resources instead of burning part of them into the Niger Delta sky while complaining that Nigeria lacks energy. Solar, hydro, gas, and other suitable sources would complement one another. Most importantly, energy policy would survive changes of government. A power project should not lose its political electricity simply because the administration that conceived it has been disconnected from office.

If we were starting again, education would stop being principally a certificate distribution system. We would ask a dangerously simple question: What can this graduate actually do? Universities would remain important, but so would technical colleges, vocational institutions, apprenticeships, and specialised training. The young Nigerian who can fabricate machinery, repair industrial equipment, programme software, install solar systems, or process agricultural products should not be regarded as academically unfortunate because he does not possess a university degree.

We would restore the dignity of teaching. A country cannot continuously underpay, frustrate, and disrespect teachers, then organise conferences to investigate falling educational standards. We would train teachers properly, pay them reasonably, and hold them accountable. The teacher would teach, the student would study, the parent would parent, and the examination would attempt the revolutionary experiment of examining.

Our universities would become centres of knowledge, rather than principally centres for obtaining certificates and buying colourful gowns for convocation photographs. Nigerian agriculture should benefit from Nigerian agricultural research. Nigerian industries should use Nigerian engineering knowledge. If a university has existed beside a farming community for forty years and is publishing papers while the farmer is still losing half his harvest, perhaps somebody should introduce the professor to the farmer.

Agriculture itself would return to the centre of production, but not the agriculture of speeches, television photographs, and hoes distributed at empowerment ceremonies. Modern agriculture means irrigation, mechanisation, research, storage, processing, insurance, transportation, and markets. Nigeria should not produce tomatoes abundantly in one state while importing tomato paste through another. We should not celebrate bumper harvests and then watch the crops rot because nobody remembered that food must travel after it grows.

We would manufacture more of what we consume. No sensible country manufactures everything, but producing more at home creates jobs, skills, and industrial capacity. A nation of more than two hundred million consumers is already an enormous market. The tragedy is when everybody in the world wants to sell to that market except the people living inside it.

Factories would also be allowed to remain factories. A Nigerian manufacturer should not have to generate electricity, drill for water, provide security, repair the access road, arrange telecommunications backup, import machinery and then pay taxes to several authorities for the privilege of doing all the things government was supposed to help make unnecessary. At some point, he is no longer a manufacturer. He is a governor without an allocation.

Industrial policy would, therefore, become boringly consistent. Investors should not wake every four years wondering whether yesterday’s incentive has become today’s offence. Customs' rules, taxation, foreign exchange policy, and industrial regulations should not change direction every time somebody in Abuja discovers a new economic vocabulary. Businesses can sometimes survive difficult policies; what they struggle to survive is policy that wakes up every morning with a different opinion.

Healthcare would receive the same practical treatment. Primary healthcare centres would provide primary healthcare. Hospitals would have equipment that works, drugs that exist, and professionals who are treated well enough to stay. Nigeria cannot continue training excellent doctors and nurses principally for Britain, America, Canada, and the Middle East while congratulating ourselves that Nigerians are doing wonderfully abroad. Their success is admirable, but when an entire medical team can hold a reunion more conveniently in London than in Lagos, there is another side to the achievement.

We would design cities for the Nigerians who actually live in them. Drainage would be constructed before floods remind us where waterways used to be. Building regulations would be enforced before buildings collapse and committees arrive. Public transport would be planned for workers. Sidewalks would belong occasionally to pedestrians rather than to generators, traders, parked cars, motorcycles, and anybody who arrived before them.

And we would maintain what we build. This alone could qualify as a Nigerian revolution. Nigeria is extraordinarily enthusiastic about commissioning and considerably less emotionally attached to maintenance. We cut ribbons beautifully. We unveil plaques. We invite traditional rulers, commissioners, permanent secretaries, party leaders, television crews, and enough photographers to document the birth of a project from twelve angles. Five years later, when the roof begins leaking, everybody who attended the commissioning has lost the building’s telephone number.

If we were starting again, every major public project would have a maintenance plan before anybody ordered the ribbon. Governments would receive credit not merely for constructing new roads but for keeping old ones usable. A functioning twenty-year-old hospital should be as impressive as a new one. Development is not only building what did not exist; sometimes, it is simply refusing to destroy what already does.

Our politics would also become cheaper. Public service should not require a person to sell property, borrow money, settle party leaders, mobilise delegates, satisfy godfathers, and spend a fortune merely to obtain an opportunity to sacrifice himself for the people. Whenever somebody spends hundreds of millions seeking an office with a comparatively modest legitimate salary, even the calculator deserves observer status at the election.

Political parties would become institutions rather than vehicles parked beside powerful individuals. Elections would become credible enough that losing would not automatically require lawyers to begin another season of politics in court. Legislatures would legislate and supervise government, executives would execute, regulators would regulate, courts would decide cases within a reasonable time, and the police would police. It sounds almost suspiciously simple.

We would also reconsider the relationship between Abuja and the states. Nigeria’s diversity is not necessarily a weakness; badly managed diversity is. A country this large cannot solve every problem from one capital. States should have enough authority and responsibility to develop according to their strengths while remaining firmly within the federation. Let them compete over education, investment, agriculture, technology, tourism, infrastructure, and quality of life instead of competing mainly over who obtained the larger allocation and the more important federal appointment.

Security would become closer to communities while retaining professional national standards and strong safeguards against political abuse. A security officer who understands the language, terrain, and people of an area possesses knowledge that cannot be supplied by a transfer letter from hundreds of kilometres away. Whatever system Nigeria ultimately develops must recognise that criminals operate locally, even when security bureaucracy operates nationally.

The Niger Delta would receive a more intelligent bargain. Oil and gas would remain national assets, but producing communities would not be expected to carry environmental damage as their private contribution to the federation. Pollution would receive the urgency given to production. Gas would become electricity and industrial feedstock rather than permanent decoration in the evening sky. Derivation and intervention funds would also be transparently accounted for, because demanding environmental justice from Abuja while stealing development money at home is not resource control; it is merely relocating the headquarters of the problem.

We would prepare seriously for a future in which crude oil may never again possess the dominance it once enjoyed. Nigeria waited decades for oil to solve everything. We should not wait until the world needs less of it before suddenly remembering that we have agriculture, gas, minerals, oceans, technology, tourism, manufacturing and more than two hundred million human beings capable of producing things.

Most importantly, we would stop believing that national development begins again whenever a new government arrives. Nigeria has restarted itself too many times. Every administration comes with a new slogan, new logo, new vocabulary, and sometimes a new colour of cap. Projects inherited from predecessors become politically suspicious. Policies are renamed. Agencies are reorganised. Committees investigate previous committees. By the time everybody understands the new direction, another election is approaching, and somebody has designed another logo.

Countries that develop think beyond four-year terms. A railway does not belong to the president who commissioned it. A university does not belong to the governor who established it. An industrial policy should not expire because the minister who announced it has been replaced. National development requires the extraordinary ability to admit that your predecessor may occasionally have had a good idea.

Perhaps, knowing everything we now know, we would also redefine success. Success would not be the number of government buildings constructed, but the quality of services delivered inside them; not how many universities exist, but what their graduates can do; not how many megawatts are announced, but how many hours electricity reaches homes and factories; not how much money is budgeted for roads, but whether Nigerians can drive on them. We would measure government by outcomes rather than announcements. Nigeria has announced enough.

Perhaps that is the advantage of sixty-six years of achievements, mistakes, coups, constitutions, oil booms, recessions, reforms, cancellations, privatisations, national plans and abandoned plans: we no longer have the excuse of innocence. We know what unreliable electricity costs. We know what abandoning agriculture can do. We know what weak institutions produce. We know what corruption destroys. We know the dangers of depending excessively on oil. We know what happens when education expands without protecting standards. We know the cost of neglecting the Niger Delta environment, and we know that Nigerians can excel spectacularly when systems allow them to.

So, if Nigeria were to start again, perhaps we would finally understand that the task is not to create another Nigeria. It is to make this one work. Not by returning to the country we knew, because much of that country properly belongs to history, and not by pretending the present Nigeria has achieved nothing, because that would also be false. The challenge is to recover what was valuable, correct what experience has exposed, and use what modern Nigeria now possesses.

We have more educated people than the Nigeria of 1960, more technology, more professionals, more entrepreneurs, more universities, more global connections, more knowledge, more capital, and certainly more committees. What we require now is not another beginning but the discipline to finish what we have already started.

If Nigeria were truly given the opportunity to start again, perhaps the wisest thing we could do would be to refuse. We have started often enough. We have launched, relaunched, restructured, reformed, rebranded, and constituted committees to review the committees that reviewed the reforms.

This time, perhaps we should simply continue and do the work properly.

Kune Nimi Igoni

Yenagoa, Bayelsa State