Washington, D.C. — No one wants a return to colonial rule, but no one expected Nigeria to be in the straits it finds itself today, 40 years after the British flag was lowered and a new independent government took over.
In the past year more than one thousand people have been killed in political blood letting. Religious law is pushing civil law aside in the North. Voices of secession are being heard in the Southwest.
Fifteen straight years of military rule have ended but now the federal government's executive side is in continual war with the legislative branch. Meanwhile, seventy percent of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank, although the country is the world's sixth largest oil exporter.
As many questions as cheers are being raised on this anniversary.
Few of the newly emerging nations of Africa seemed as promising as Nigeria. There were abundant agricultural and mineral resources and a solid core of dynamic human resources.
Anti-colonial Nigerian leaders like Herbert Macaulay, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe were respected across the African continent. Writers like Soyinka, Achebe, Okigbo, Ekwensi and Tutuola, popular at home and abroad, made Nigeria seem a land filled with extraordinary literary and intellectual talent. Certainly from outside the continent, Nigeria seemed poised to lead the way toward a new Africa. Instead, it has become Africa's greatest example of unfulfilled potential.
Nigerians, for the most part, acknowledge that they took a wrong turn somewhere. An editorial in Nigeria's Vanguard Daily newspaper last week seemed to sum up the nation's disappointment with itself by asking and answering, "...why would the optimism of 1960 give way to the despair of 2000? Greed has played a very great part in our unfortunate circumstance - greed for power and greed for filthy lucre to the detriment of the nation and its people."
That's part of the usual finger-pointing and no less true for being - in every corner of Nigeria - a commonly held attitude.
But other contributors to Nigeria's decline may be more pertinent to the dialogue of non-Nigerians. Most of Nigeria's forty years of independence have been under military rule. And all of those military rulers were trained and recipients of aid from Europe and the United States. Whatever their Nigerian interests, ambitions and cruelties, these rulers also served larger and -- dare we say it -- more global interests.
Nigeria's enormous debt burden grew up under these regimes. The burden continues to mount because creditors -- again our eyes must turn to western nations -- refuse pleas for relief. At the last gathering of the "Paris Club" of creditor nations Japan led the opposition to debt relief arguing that Nigeria was not poor enough for it.
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And there is little doubt that the crushing poverty and environmental degradation in the Niger delta area is linked to the great financial profit overseas oil corporations are able to extract from the region.
Finally, to a non-Nigerian trying to look more deeply than the issues of leadership, governance and the economy, Nigeria seems less Nigerian than it did on October 1, 1960.
It's not that Nigeria's people are any less fiercely Nigerian; and that in itself is quite remarkable since in some ways Nigeria is one of Africa's most artificial colonial constructs.
But in 1960, and in the years of agitation leading to independence, hope for the future was lodged in a shared idea of nation: common laws protecting all citizens, institutions that linked culturally diverse groups to a national culture, and resources used for nation-building.
Looking at Nigeria today this seems some romantic idea from the distant past. The critical question confronting Nigeria today - embracing all the questions of leadership, governance and the economy - is whether the ideal of one Nigeria still exists.
