Nigeria's Generational Capital - How Many More Generations Will Be Wasted?

23 June 2021
opinion

Jos — When Professor Wole Soyinka dismissed his generation as wasted, I thought at the time that a deep seminal perspective had emerged for understanding Nigeria's predicament. Many years after that claim, Nigeria's national integration project kept unraveling. And it has been unraveling in a most undesirable manner at the most fundamental level of the state's responsibility to her citizens: security. From kidnapping to banditry, and from insurgency to nationalist agitations, we see Nigeria's national fabric bursting at the seams. Intellectuals, scholars and well-meaning Nigerians are agitated about the possible ways by which the doomsday prophecies and predictions about Nigeria's failure and possible implosion can be undermined. I am equally concerned. And my concern stems from many years of professional reflections and service to the Nigerian state as a civil servant. My search for institutional and governance reform still remains the most logical and structural conclusion of my agitation for the enabling of Nigeria's national project of national integration. I should then be deeply worried that the challenge of translating the grand vision of Nigeria's greatness remains perpetually trapped. Or rather, something negative seems to be the only result we can get from many years of trying to build one nation out of my ethno-national diversity.

Being a civil servant in Nigeria remains for me one of the most patriotic professional vocations around which the task of good governance is hinged. But at the height of my vocational service, I had cause to be genuinely shocked again, out of my intellectual wit, by this Laureate Wole Soyinka's notorious but profound claim that his was a wasted generation. This was a claim that indeed caused serious national consternation and outcry when it was made. The claim would later jumpstart my curious interrogation of the critical link between generational capital and the success or failure of Nigeria's national project. The kernel of that critical reflection is simple: the problem with Nigeria is not simply that of leadership, but a leadership that is aggravated by generational deficiencies. In other words, "the problem afflicting the concretisation of the Nigerian Project is the winding and protracted crisis of generational encumbrances transferred from one period to another from independence. The crisis consists of not only the lack of personal example, but also the persistent near-invisibility of a collective generational will to offset the multidimensional deficits colonialism bequeathed to Nigeria."

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