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A country is independent when she is not relying on another country or others for aid or support. Nigeria claim to have gained independence on 1 October 1960, which makes it 58 years of gaining freedom from the British government.
Our country Nigeria lacks so many characteristics of a truly independent and sovereign nation.
If Nigeria is 58 years as at today with all those natural resources and yet we can not separate stones from our rice that means we need to be re-colonize.
Nigeria has all the ingredients to be a great nation but we lack development in all aspect. So, tell me what are we celebrating? Is it the national strike that was just called off yesterday we are celebrating? Tell me what we are celebrating.
Before a country will want to stand as an independent country it might have all it take to survive independently and we all know that Nigeria has a lot of natural resource to survive. Nigeria that is blessed with raw materials such as iron ore, coal, natural gas and limestones but is still struggling with what to do with the dormant steel plant.
Twenty years ago, Nigeria was still thinking seriously about producing her own cars and had put in place, the seed of the infrastructure required to do so. Today we are not even capable of properly repairing the cars we import. At independence Nigeria was far better than Singapore and Malaysia and a number of other countries of the world; but today, Nigeria is not what it should be and I think the problem is human; it’s a human problem.
It is not a question of resources because we’ve got enormous resources – is it cocoa, groundnut, oil and gas, rubber? We’ve got everything. The critical factor is what do you make of what you produce and what do you make of the proceeds of what you produce? Nigerians don’t value what they have. For instance, South Korea, which started its steel construction around the same time with Ajaokuta steel now has a revenue base of over N60 billion dollars per annum and employed over 65,000 staff.
Ajaokuta steel will have employed 10,000 technical staff and 500,000 unskilled staff if it start it operation, so do you know how much Nigeria will have been generating from Ajaokuta steel per annum? But today can we compare Nigeria with South Korea in terms of development?
In June 2003, former President Olusegun Obasanjo conceded Ajaokuta steel to Messrs SOLGAS ENERGY of USA on a 10-year tenure; in August 2004, the Federal Government terminated the SOLGAS Agreement due to non-performance. This don’t happen in a truly independent country.
Nigeria claim to gained freedom from the British but to me I think the British just want to let go of us to live our lives the way we like and that is why today Nigeria don’t have any freedom; we don’t have financial freedom we are still borrowing money from external source, we still travel abroad for medical checkup, we still travel abroad to school, we are still seeking the idea of the foreigners over our resources, we are still inviting the foreigners to come and make uses of our resource using us as the human resource and pay us, so tell me is this an independent country.
The major problem of Nigeria is that Nigeria is been controlled by few people who sees themselves as the leaders and we are not using our constitution anymore we only claim to use it.
In conclusion, my candid advice to my fellow Nigerians is that no country can develop if there is no unity, let work as one let us love one another let show no differences among us,let us invest on what we have and value it, an adage says that “Since you can not have what you like is better you like what you have” Nigeria is what we have and we can not have America as our own country.
– Abdulmumin Ahmed, a human rights activist, write from Okene, Kogi State.
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