Today should be a day of deep national and individual reflection by those who call themselves Nigerians. Today we cross into the other side of midnight, half a century plus one of what I call flag independence and three more years before we clock a century as one cobbled-together nation. I’m not a great fan of flag Independence, especially the type we celebrate in Africa. I mean, it’s all great using the opportunity to spread goodwill and wish our nation well; but how long are we going to sit there and look away from the rot, hoping that the country will just be whole again, all by magic?

Are we celebrating the open butchery of the nation by the gruesomely predatory elite, the armed robbers shooting citizens at will and carting off their property with no police in sight or the kidnappers who brazenly make a business of selling people back to their families and loved ones, where not killing them for fun? Are we celebrating the fact that our universities are now glorified secondary schools with no place in the list of real learning institutions, even in Africa? Are we celebrating the death of primary health care, not to talk of anything a little more – to the extent that victims of the United Nations offices’ bombing in Abuja had to be taken to South Africa for basic treatment and poor Bill Gates had to show his face in our neck of the woods recently in his frustrating fight against polio of all diseases in Nigeria?

Are we celebrating the suborning of traditional rulers and traditional institutions as they fall over themselves to indiscriminately support whoever is in power at whatever level, just so they can eat and run big palaces? Oh, maybe we are celebrating the fact that our manufacturing sector is suffering the lowest capacity utilization in Africa or that we are running an economy where money is chasing money into the vast pockets of the manipulators to the extent that over seventy percent of Nigerians still live below the poverty line in the 21st century!

Yes, we are celebrating the importation of fuel when we are an oil producing nation! We are celebrating the spoliation that our greed has brought to one of the best ecosystems in the world and the gassing of the owners of the land, while we spirit oil away for hard dollars to be stolen by those who claim to be serving us and protecting our interest in Abuja and the State Houses all over the federation. We are celebrating our inability to diversify our economy, with the vast non-oil resources we have all over, half a century after flag independence. We are celebrating being unable to provide electricity to run our nation in a land where gas is flared indiscriminately, the sun scorches from morning till night, the wind blowing, the rivers flowing. We are celebrating our leaders’ mastery of giving hare-brained excuses for why we are still prostrate when we should be sprinting!

You may want to know why all this is allowed to continue in Nigeria, why the so-called international community isn’t putting enough pressure on our leadership to deliver the much-touted dividends of democracy to the people. You may wonder why their representatives all troop into Abuja, smiling on TV and in photographs with the President and our leaders and speaking so highly of some unseen progress we are making as a nation. Are they doing this because there are no riots everywhere, no civil war going on and no sense that great instability is afoot to the extent that their oil hunger won’t be fed, even if three-quarters of the people get gobbled up by poverty and disease? Well, they know. They know of the Civil War, they have seen the insurgency in the Niger-Delta and they have sat with their clients to design an amnesty programme that does everything, but take care of the people that matter. Development can be thrown to the dogs while a bit of flesh is tossed to the boys! Yeah, Boko Haram is no more than a teeny-weeny strand of the prevalent problem of worldwide terrorism, isn’t it? And as for those hungry faces starring them (as they whizz to airports to return to their cushioned life outside), didn’t they read the glowing reports of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Ministry of Finance? Oh, maybe the problem is one of lack of communication, rather than one of achievement, they conclude….

Of course, there is a school of thought that says we are this bad at self-governance, because we did not fight for independence with blood and tears. The Azikiwes, Awolowos and Ahmadu Bellos and the other nationalists all just jaw-jawed with the White man who was anyway tired of his imperial pretentions after the Second World War and the loss of the crown jewel in India. Independence was granted us on a platter of gold, they claim. Well, true followers of history know it wasn’t. From the moment the White man stepped foot on our soil for slaves, through the time of the supposed legitimate trade, and colonialism, we Nigerians had consistently paid with our blood and birth right. There can be no worse violence visited on a people than to be considered uncivilized, carted away as slaves, dictated to on the price of your natural produce and then get ruled over by force of the Maxim gun, all over 400 years!