Abuja — Today marks the 49th year of Nigeria as a nation. Perhaps reflecting the state of the nation, government officials seem to be in no mood to celebrate. And yet any milestone, not least an anniversary such as this one, should be occasion to clink glasses and be merry. Sadly, this is not the case with us this year. And this has been so for the last ten years, since the heady days of the return to civil rule, after many years of oppressive military dictatorships, gave way to a more sombre assessment of our status in the comity of nations.

The period in which Nigerians gave their new crop of leaders the benefit of the doubt, while they re-learnt the ropes of democracy and got over the hangover of the military has been replaced with doubts about the quality of this leadership, the sincerity of its commitment to good governance and its ability-or willingness-to deliver. The hope of a new vista in transparency and a better strategy for the progress of the nation, following the eight years of the truculent administration of Olusegun Obasanjo, has almost evaporated in the last couple of years. The much-touted 7-point Agenda of the timorous, if lethargic, Umaru Musa Yar'adua administration, on the other hand, and the mantra of the government's determination to make Nigeria a global player in 2020 through it Vision 20:2020 programme, have so far proved to be little more than sloganeering. If the huge sums of money that administration officials claim are being spent to make these dreams a reality, we have yet to see the results manifest in the social indicator indices that in fact tell a completely different story.

The statistics are depressingly staggering-and foreboding.

Only recently the coordinator of the government-run National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP), Dr Magnus Kpakol, disclosed that some 75 million Nigerians-half the countries population, are living below the 'poverty line'. NAPEP was created as part of wide-ranging poverty reduction strategies, including the establishment of micro-finance institutions to grant loans to small-holder enterprises, which have made no discernible impact of the level of destitution among the vast majority of Nigerians.

A couple of weeks back, former head of the Interim National Government of Nigeria, Chief Ernest Shonekan, said that the government over the last ten years has 'invested' over 10 billion dollars in the power sector. In his characteristic understatement, the former Head of State, who now chairs the government-created Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission (ICRC), noted that if that unspeakably huge amount of money was meant to electrify most of the country, 'the result has been clearly disappointing'. The Energy Commission of Nigeria reported recently that only forty percent of Nigerians have access to public electricity. Given the preponderance of power generating sets in virtually every nook and cranny of the country, we have reservation about that figure; we think it is an exaggeration. No city in the country, including the nation's capital, can boast of 24-hour uninterrupted power supply on any given day. Yet power is the fulcrum that moves every other aspect of development. As we have seen from the misadventure of the infamous power probe in the House of Representatives, it is also the fountain of corruption in the country. The gap between the demand by Nigerians for basic public and social infrastructure service, and the ability of government to fulfil its duty by making them available, tells the story of the failure of governance at every level today.

If there a few bright spots, we have not mentioned them because we think they represent an infinitesimal part of the government's social contract, which we think is on the verge of breaking. The truth is that on the eve of next year's half-centenary of independence, Nigerians are suffering; the country's economy is in a tailspin, the entire country in tottering under a burden of official graft, social unrest, and a multiplicity of other crimes. The ship of state appears to be adrift, its managers nonplussed over which direction to take, or are incapable of making the decision. For a country this big, that does not sound like a good omen. Our leaders must change course.