By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
I had long resolved that I would not be writing anything about Nigeria as October 1 approached. The weight of repetition, the endless cycle of lamentations and hollow celebrations, had convinced me that silence might be the better choice. Yet, on this very day – October 1, 2025 – that silence was broken. Driving through the streets of Umuahia, and later making the journey from Umuahia to Aba, I found myself confronted by sights, encounters, and conversations that refused to be ignored.
Each moment along the way carried its own quiet insistence: the faces of ordinary people navigating hardship with resilience, the fragments of conversations overheard in markets and on the roadside, the subtle contrasts between weariness and hope. These impressions gathered themselves into questions that pressed heavily on my mind, demanding more than passive observation.
And then, as if to confirm that reflection could no longer be postponed, a call came from Afia TV, inviting me to join their Independence Reflections and Conversations. It felt less like coincidence and more like a summons – to gather my thoughts, to wrestle with what I had seen and heard, and to speak, however imperfectly, to the meaning of this day. What follows, then, is the outcome of those journeys, those encounters, and…
The sixty-fifth anniversary of Nigeria’s independence should have been a moment of collective reflection, a pause in the nation’s restless march to survival, but instead it passed like any other day. In Abuja, the capital, the rituals of statehood unfolded with predictable pomp – flags fluttered in the breeze, podiums gleamed under the morning sun, and officials recited familiar lines about unity and greatness. Yet, beyond the carefully choreographed spectacle, the pulse of the real Nigeria beat to a very different rhythm. The ordinary citizen did not stop to celebrate; they were too busy navigating the daily struggle for existence.
Travelling from Umuahia to Aba, I saw this contrast unfold vividly. In Umuahia, the atmosphere was subdued, almost indifferent, as if the day carried no special weight. But the moment we left the city and journeyed down the old Umuahia – Ubakala road, the façade of national celebration dissolved completely. By the time we approached Aba, the heartbeat of commerce drowned out any echo of independence. The markets were alive with noise and urgency – hawkers shouting, traders bargaining, buses honking, and pedestrians weaving through the chaos. The so-called public holiday was swallowed by the sheer force of survival, as though the idea of pausing for a national milestone was an unaffordable luxury.
Aba itself was a revelation. At Jubilee Road and Hospital Road, the frenzy was overwhelming, a living metaphor for a people whose allegiance was not to the abstract notion of Nigeria but to the immediacy of livelihood. Conversations with traders and passersby underscored this truth: no one cared about the anniversary. To them, it was irrelevant, almost alien. When I asked why, their puzzled stares suggested that the very question was misplaced. It was as if to celebrate Nigeria was to celebrate something distant, intangible, and disconnected from their reality.
This dissonance is not new. Chinua Achebe once observed that “Nigeria is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.” That absence of trust in leadership has trickled down into the psyche of the people, producing what can be called the unnigerianness of Nigerians – a condition where the idea of Nigeria exists only on paper, in speeches, and in ceremonial displays, but not in the lived experiences of its citizens. For millions, the nation has been reduced to a backdrop against which individual survival plays out. The collective dream has been displaced by the private hustle.
The chilling realization, then, is that Nigeria at 65 is not a unified story of nationhood, but a tale of fragmentation. The state celebrates itself, but the people, weary and disillusioned, have quietly moved on. The idea of Nigeria has become less about shared destiny and more about individual endurance. As Wole Soyinka once remarked, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” Perhaps, in this silence of indifference, we are witnessing not just the death of patriotism, but the slow unraveling of the very idea of Nigeria itself.
The silence of indifference that greeted Nigeria’s sixty-fifth independence anniversary is not mere apathy – it is, in fact, the most eloquent and damning verdict on six and a half decades of broken promises. This indifference is not born of ignorance, nor is it a careless shrug of the shoulders. Rather, it is a rational, deeply learned response to a state that has consistently failed to justify its own existence in the lives of its citizens. Nigerians have not simply “stopped caring”; they have, through lived experience, concluded that the nation has little to offer beyond the rhetoric of unity and greatness.
When the founding fathers – Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, and Ahmadu Bello – stood at the dawn of independence, they envisioned Nigeria as a grand experiment in pluralism, a vibrant tapestry woven from over 250 ethnic threads. Azikiwe famously declared that “let us bind ourselves together under a common citizenship, so that our diversity may be our strength.” The dream was noble: that Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Tiv, Ijaw, and countless others could coexist not merely in tolerance, but in mutual enrichment. This was the celebrated myth of unity in diversity, a phrase that adorned speeches, textbooks, and national celebrations.
Yet, history has revealed a harsher truth. What was meant to be Nigeria’s greatest strength has instead metastasized into its most enduring weakness. The politics of exclusion, the uneven distribution of resources, and the relentless weaponization of ethnicity have turned the mosaic into a fractured wall. As historian Toyin Falola observes, “Nigeria’s problem has never been diversity, but the failure of leadership to manage diversity.” The civil war of 1967 – 1970 may have ended militarily, but its ghosts were never laid to rest. They linger in the structures of governance and in the psyche of the people.
The federal character principle, designed to ensure inclusivity, has too often become a tool for mediocrity, rewarding token representation over merit. Local government allocations and state creation exercises have been manipulated to favour certain regions, entrenching resentment rather than healing wounds. The result is a national consciousness that instinctively perceives “the other” not as a partner in progress, but as a rival in the scramble for scarce opportunities. As political scientist Richard Joseph once described, Nigeria has become trapped in a cycle of “prebendal politics,” where public office is seen not as a trust for all, but as a prize for one’s ethnic or regional group.
In this reality, the promise of unity feels less like a binding truth and more like a historical delusion – a story repeated in official circles but dismissed in the bustling, pragmatic streets of Aba, Kano, or Port Harcourt. On the ground, Nigerians have learned to trust their ethnic networks, religious affiliations, or personal hustles far more than the abstract entity called “Nigeria.” The state exists, but only as a distant, often predatory force. The people survive, but not because of it – rather, in spite of it.
Thus, the indifference of the masses is not silence but a verdict, not passivity but resistance. It is the quiet declaration that sixty-five years after independence, the idea of Nigeria has failed to translate into the lived reality of Nigerians. As Achebe warned in The Trouble with Nigeria, “There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air, or anything else. The problem is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” That failure has bred not only disillusionment but a profound detachment from the very notion of nationhood itself.
Nowhere does the paradox of Nigeria’s broken promise become more visceral, more terrifying, than in the daily encounter with the state’s most visible emblem of authority: the policeman. He is everywhere – on the highways, at checkpoints, in the markets, and outside government buildings – yet he embodies not the dignity of law, but its desecration. His uniform, intended as a symbol of service, has become a costume of predation. The badge on his chest carries no moral weight; it is not a covenant with the citizenry, but a license to exploit them. In his hands, the law is not a shield for the weak, but a weapon for personal survival and enrichment.
This is not about a few “bad eggs.” The Nigerian policeman who extorts bribes at checkpoints, who brutalizes the innocent, who treats the law as a negotiable commodity, is not an aberration but a symptom of a deeper institutional rot. From the very moment of induction, he is socialized into a culture of impunity. As legal scholar Rotimi Suberu has observed, “The Nigerian police do not enforce the law; they enforce themselves.” The institution itself has been hollowed out, its ethos corrupted, until what remains is a machinery of coercion divorced from accountability.
The horrific confirmation of this reality came during the nationwide cost-of-living protests under the banner #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria. Amnesty International documented that police killed at least 24 peaceful protesters, often firing live ammunition at close range. Video evidence circulated globally, showing uniformed officers aiming to kill, not disperse. Instead of accountability, the state responded with repression. Amnesty International condemned the government’s “sham trials” based on “bogus charges,” in which protesters were dragged before courts while the security forces who murdered citizens walked free. A year later, not a single officer has been prosecuted. This silence is not accidental – it is systemic.
The perversion of the law into a tool of oppression is one of the most corrosive forces eroding the Nigerian identity. The gun, which ought to symbolize protection, now represents intimidation. The checkpoint, which should reassure travelers, now instills dread. As sociologist Claude Ake once noted, “In Nigeria, the state is not an instrument of order but a source of insecurity.” This inversion of roles – where the guardian becomes the predator – creates a profound alienation between citizens and the state. It is not just that Nigerians distrust their police; it is that they no longer see the police as part of the same moral community.
This alienation feeds directly into the sense of unnigerianness. If the policeman – the face of state authority – owes no allegiance to the law, why should the citizen owe allegiance to the state? The absence of accountability has created a vacuum where law is not a shared covenant but a marketplace of power. In such a system, “no one guards the guards,” and the very institution meant to safeguard the nation becomes the clearest evidence of its betrayal.
When the protectors of society mutate into predators, the very foundation of a shared national identity collapses. The social contract – what Thomas Hobbes once described as the implicit agreement between citizens and the state to exchange obedience for protection – ceases to exist. In Nigeria, this rupture is not theoretical; it is lived daily. My own encounters with the police on the roads from Umuahia to Aba, where a uniformed officer’s outstretched hand demanded “something for the boys,” were not isolated events. They were reminders that the gun slung across his shoulder was not a shield for me, but a threat against me. The chilling truth is that the uniform, once meant to symbolize safety, has been stripped of its meaning. It now embodies fear, coercion, and exploitation.
This is why the statement that “the gun has become a tool of exploitation and not protection” is not just rhetoric – it is the logical conclusion of a system that has inverted its purpose. For the ordinary Nigerian, the sight of a policeman does not inspire confidence but dread. The question is not “Will he protect me?” but “How much will he take from me?” or worse, “Will I survive this encounter?” This erosion of trust is at the heart of what I call the unnigerianness of Nigerians. If the state’s most visible agents can kill you for protesting the price of bread, or detain you for daring to question authority, then what claim does that state have on your loyalty?
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon once wrote that “the colonized man is an envious man.” But in postcolonial Nigeria, the citizen is not envious – he is alienated. The state, through its agents, communicates a brutal message: “You do not belong here. You are not seen. You are not valued.” This message is not whispered; it is shouted through the crack of gunfire at peaceful protesters, through the humiliation of roadside extortion, through the silence of unpunished atrocities. Amnesty International’s reports on the #EndSARS and #EndBadGovernance protests confirm what Nigerians already know: the state does not merely fail to protect its people, it actively victimizes them.
This alienation is not a personal failing of the citizen; it is a rational, almost inevitable response to abandonment. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, the legitimacy of any state rests on its ability to uphold the social contract. When the state defaults – when it cannot secure life, liberty, and dignity – citizens withdraw emotionally and psychologically from the idea of belonging. This is precisely what has happened in Nigeria. The unnigerianness is not apathy, but clarity. It is the recognition that the so-called nation has failed to act as a nation.
Yet, this condition is not without consequences. A people who no longer feel bound by the state will inevitably retreat into alternative identities – ethnic, religious, regional, or purely individual. This is why Nigerians often say, “I am Igbo first,” or “I am Yoruba first,” or “I am just on my own.” The vacuum left by the collapse of the social contract is filled by smaller, more immediate loyalties. As Wole Soyinka once lamented, “When the state abandons its citizens, the citizens will abandon the state.” This abandonment is not rebellion – it is survival.
And so, the paradox persists: Nigeria celebrates 65 years of independence, yet millions of its people feel unmoored from the very idea of Nigeria. The policeman at the checkpoint, the soldier at the protest ground, the bureaucrat in the office – all serve as daily reminders that the state does not see its people as citizens, but as subjects. And in this relationship of domination rather than service, the dream of a shared Nigerian identity withers, replaced by the cold, pragmatic instinct to simply endure.
And so, we arrive at the most intimate and devastating consequence of Nigeria’s systemic failure: the birth of what I call the citizen-ghost. This figure is not merely disillusioned or apathetic; he is suspended in a liminal space, belonging to nowhere. He does not feel like a citizen of Nigeria, yet he cannot fully claim citizenship anywhere else. The haunting question reverberates within him: “How can I truly feel at home elsewhere, when my roots here have been bunged up, and in many cases, violently uprooted?” This is the ultimate expression of unnigerianness – not just the absence of national pride, but the deeper, more corrosive condition of rootlessness.
The tragedy is that the state has not only failed to provide a functional present, it has actively vandalized the past and mortgaged the future. Our roots, which should draw nourishment from a shared history of resilience and cultural richness, have been clogged with the debris of corruption, violence, and betrayal. In too many cases, those roots have been ripped out entirely. Communities are displaced by conflicts that are often stoked by political actors who weaponize ethnicity and religion for personal gain. Families are uprooted from ancestral lands by banditry, terrorism, and state neglect. The economy, instead of anchoring its people, expels them; the brightest minds flee in a desperate brain drain, leaving behind hollowed institutions and fractured communities.
I have seen this rootlessness in the eyes of friends who left for Canada or the UK, clutching new passports but still carrying Nigeria in their accents, their food, their jokes – and in their pain. They are not fully at home abroad, yet they no longer feel at home here. They live in what Salman Rushdie once called “imaginary homelands,” spaces of longing and dislocation. Those of us who remain are no less haunted. We walk the streets of Aba or Lagos or Kano with the uneasy knowledge that the ground beneath us is unstable, that the nation we inhabit does not recognize us as its own.
This condition is not unique to Nigeria, but in Nigeria it has acquired a particularly brutal character. The state’s failure has severed the moral and social threads that bind a people together. As Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities, nations are sustained not only by institutions but by shared stories. Nigeria’s story, however, has been repeatedly vandalized – by coups, by civil war, by corruption, by the cynical rewriting of history. What remains is not a unifying narrative but a cacophony of competing grievances.
The citizen-ghost is, therefore, the embodiment of this fractured reality. He is present but unseen, alive but unanchored. He is Nigerian by accident of birth, but not by any meaningful sense of belonging. His condition is not a personal failing but a rational adaptation to abandonment. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o once wrote, “A people deprived of their history are a people deprived of their humanity.” In Nigeria, the state has not only failed to safeguard the future; it has mutilated the past, leaving its citizens suspended in a perpetual present of uncertainty.
This is the most devastating form of unnigerianness: not anger, not even despair, but rootlessness – the slow erosion of the very possibility of belonging.
What is a root, after all? It is more than a biological metaphor – it is a sense of place, a narrative of belonging, a connection to a story larger than oneself. Roots anchor us in history, give us a language of identity, and provide continuity between past, present, and future. To be rooted is to know not only where one comes from, but also where one stands. Yet in Nigeria, the soil in which these roots might grow has been poisoned, leaving citizens suspended between fragments of identities that never quite cohere into a whole.
Nigeria, in its chaotic and often cruel trajectory, has offered not a coherent story but a fractured plot. What we are taught in schools is not a shared history but a contested one. The civil war is glossed over or reduced to a footnote, colonial exploitation is sanitized, and the failures of post-independence leaders are often rewritten as triumphs. The result is a generation raised not on truth but on selective memory, forced to pledge allegiance to a flag whose meaning is unclear, and to a state whose laws do not protect them. We are told to celebrate “national heroes,” yet the political arena seems to produce far more villains than visionaries. In this way, the very narrative that should nourish our roots is instead a source of confusion and alienation.
Our cultural roots, deeply embedded in our specific ethnic nations – Yoruba, Igbo, Tiv, Ijaw, Kanuri, Nupe, and hundreds more – are treated not as treasures to be preserved and integrated, but as problems to be managed. Instead of celebrating Nigeria’s extraordinary plurality as a foundation for strength, successive governments have approached diversity as a threat to unity. Policies like the federal character principle, while designed to ensure inclusion, have often been reduced to crude quotas that breed resentment rather than cohesion. The richness of our ethnic traditions – our languages, proverbs, music, and philosophies – are often sidelined in favor of a homogenized “Nigerianness” that feels artificial, imposed, and shallow.
This leaves us in a state of suspension: unable to lean fully into our local heritage without being accused of tribalism, yet unable to embrace a national identity that feels like a poorly fitted costume, worn only under duress. I have felt this tension personally – when speaking my mother tongue in public spaces, I am subtly reminded that it marks me as “other” outside my ethnic enclave. Yet when I attempt to wear the cloak of nationalism, it feels hollow, as if I am reciting lines from a script that was never written for me. This is the paradox of being Nigerian: to be too Igbo, too Yoruba, too Tiv, too Ijaw to be fully Nigerian, but too Nigerian to be fully anything else.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once argued that identity is sustained by “primordial attachments” – the deep, affective ties of kinship, language, and culture. Nigeria has consistently failed to weave these primordial attachments into a coherent national fabric. Instead, it has sought to suppress them, as though unity could only be achieved by erasing difference. But erasure does not create unity; it creates resentment. The result is a hollow nationalism, a flag without roots, a pledge without conviction.
This fractured condition explains why so many Nigerians describe their identity in terms of negation: I am Nigerian, but… But Igbo first. But Yoruba first. But Christian first. But Muslim first. National identity, instead of being an inheritance, becomes a burden – something to be endured, not embraced. And in this dissonance, the roots that should ground us in belonging are left dangling, exposed, vulnerable to the storms of corruption, violence, and disillusionment.
In the end, roots are not just about where we come from – they are about where we can grow. And in Nigeria, the soil has been so depleted, so toxified by decades of misrule and mistrust, that growth feels almost impossible. What should have been the nourishing ground for a shared destiny has become a contested terrain, leaving us stranded between the richness of our local identities and the emptiness of a national identity that has never truly taken root.
This leaves us in what I can only call a global limbo, a condition of suspended belonging that stretches far beyond Nigeria’s borders. The world does not see us as citizens of a proud, functioning nation; it sees us through the prism of our green passport, a document that has become less a marker of identity than a scarlet letter. At airports, it is not merely a travel document but a trigger for suspicion. We are the ones pulled aside for “random” checks, our bags rifled through with extra zeal, our visas scrutinized with the presumption of fraud. The indignity is not just procedural; it is existential. It is the world telling us, in subtle and overt ways, that the state we come from has failed to confer upon us the dignity of unquestioned belonging.
This suspicion bleeds into every sphere. Nigerian professionals abroad often find that their qualifications, no matter how rigorous, are treated with doubt. A medical degree from Ibadan, a law degree from Nsukka, or an engineering degree from Ahmadu Bello University is not seen as equivalent to its Western counterpart, even though many of our brightest minds outperform their peers once given the chance. To be Nigerian abroad is to live under the burden of overperformance. You must be twice as good to be considered half as competent. You must work harder, speak clearer, and achieve more, just to be allowed into the ordinary. And yet, even in this superhuman striving, the shadow of Nigeria follows you.
We attempt to graft ourselves onto new societies, but the trauma of uprooting is not easily shed. Our accents betray us, our memories tether us, our names mark us. We become permanent guests in other lands, tolerated but never fully embraced. Even second-generation Nigerians abroad, born in London or Toronto, often speak of being asked, “Where are you really from?” The answer, of course, is Nigeria – a homeland that itself no longer recognizes us. For many in the diaspora, the return home is not a homecoming but an encounter with estrangement: the roads more broken, the bureaucracy more hostile, the corruption more brazen. The very nation that failed us still demands our loyalty, our money, our labor, but offers no recognition in return.
And yet, paradoxically, it is the diaspora that sustains Nigeria. We are the ones sending remittances that keep families afloat, that fund school fees, medical bills, and even small businesses. In 2022 alone, Nigerians abroad sent home over $20 billion – a sum larger than foreign direct investment and official development aid combined. We are, in effect, ghost citizens, funding a phantom state. The irony is bitter: those who have been uprooted, those who have been alienated, those who have been forced to seek dignity elsewhere, are the very ones propping up the state that abandoned them.
How, then, can one feel fully Canadian, British, or American, when Nigeria refuses to release its grip? The question is not simply one of switching allegiance, as though citizenship were a matter of changing jerseys. It is a deeper crisis: the absence of solid ground upon which to build any allegiance at all. Nigeria haunts us – not only in our accents and our memories, but in the unrequited demands it makes on our souls. We carry it with us, whether we want to or not, as both wound and inheritance. To be Nigerian in the world is to be perpetually in-between: too marked by Nigeria to belong fully elsewhere, yet too estranged from Nigeria to belong fully at home.
This relentless daily humiliation erodes the human spirit in ways no GDP figure, no economic growth statistic, can ever capture. Numbers may tell us that Nigeria is “Africa’s largest economy,” but numbers do not reflect the hollow eyes of a graduate who cannot draft a simple application letter because the education system has betrayed him. They do not capture the shame of a father who, in the face of marauding bandits, realizes he is powerless to protect his family because the state has abdicated its most fundamental duty: the monopoly of legitimate force. They do not measure the quiet despair of a mother watching her child’s future evaporate before her eyes, as the promise of education, opportunity, and safety collapses into the abyss of unemployment, insecurity, and hopelessness.
This is the violence of humiliation – subtle, pervasive, and corrosive. It is not only the spectacular violence of bullets and batons, but the slow violence of neglect, of being unseen, of being abandoned by the very structures meant to sustain life. The South African scholar Achille Mbembe calls this necropolitics – the politics of deciding who may live and who must die. In Nigeria, this death is not always physical; it is often social, emotional, and spiritual. It is the slow killing of hope, the daily erosion of dignity, the steady stripping away of the sense that one’s life has value in the eyes of the state.
And yet, amid this suffering, the privileged few – those insulated by wealth, power, or proximity to the state – speak the loudest about patriotism. They wave the flag, sing the anthem, and preach love of country as though it were a moral obligation. But what does patriotism mean in a land where the country shows no love for its people? To demand loyalty from the abandoned is not patriotism; it is cruelty. To preach sacrifice to those already sacrificed is not leadership; it is obscenity.
This is why the rhetoric of patriotism rings so hollow in Nigeria. True patriotism is reciprocal – it is born of mutual recognition between citizen and state. It thrives where the state protects, nurtures, and affirms the dignity of its people. But in Nigeria, the state does not reciprocate. It demands allegiance while offering abandonment, it insists on loyalty while delivering betrayal. And so, what passes for patriotism becomes little more than propaganda – a tool wielded by the privileged to preserve their own comfort, while the majority are left to navigate humiliation as a daily reality.
The tragedy is not only that citizens are humiliated, but that they are then asked to celebrate their humiliation as love of country. This is the ultimate insult: to be stripped of dignity, and then told that this stripping is the essence of belonging. In such a context, patriotism is not a virtue but a weapon, used to silence dissent and to mask the failures of a state that has long abandoned its people.
Having lived through six decades of this journey, I have seen the green and white flag rise with pride and fall with disappointment, fluttering as both symbol and symptom of a nation that has never fully reconciled its promise with its performance. I have heard the soaring promises of leaders – each administration declaring itself the dawn of a new era, each claiming to be the one that will finally deliver Nigeria to its destiny. And I have also heard, more persistently, the muffled cries of the people: the market woman whose goods rot because of bad roads, the teacher who has not been paid in months, the young graduate whose dreams are reduced to a daily hustle for survival. These two voices – the lofty rhetoric of the ruling class and the muted despair of the ordinary citizen – have never harmonized. Instead, they have produced a dissonance that has become the soundtrack of Nigeria’s postcolonial life.
It is in this dissonance that the phenomenon of unnigerianness emerges. The bustling, commerce-driven normalcy of Aba on Independence Day is not, as some might think, a rejection of the idea of Nigeria. It is, rather, a response to its prolonged and painful betrayal. The people have learned, through repeated cycles of hope and disappointment, that the state cannot be trusted to deliver on its promises. What remains, then, is a coping mechanism: a pragmatic recalibration of loyalty away from flag and anthem, and toward the immediate realities of survival. In the absence of a functioning state, the people have created their own informal systems of resilience – markets, kinship networks, diasporic remittances – that sustain life even as the official structures collapse.
This shift is not unique to Nigeria; it echoes what James C. Scott, in Weapons of the Weak, describes as the “everyday forms of resistance” that ordinary people deploy in the face of oppressive or ineffective authority. Nigerians are not storming the barricades or burning the flag; they are simply ignoring it, refusing to invest their emotional energy in rituals of patriotism that no longer serve them. The silence of the streets on Independence Day is not apathy – it is a quiet act of resistance, a refusal to participate in a performance that has lost all meaning. It is the sound of a citizenry that has renegotiated the terms of its existence with the state, choosing pragmatic survival over symbolic loyalty.
This silence is profoundly telling. It is not an absence of sound, but the presence of something heavier: the weight of disappointment, the residue of betrayal, the exhaustion of faith. It is a silence that speaks volumes, echoing the words of Frantz Fanon, who warned that postcolonial states often reproduce the same structures of alienation as their colonial predecessors. Nigeria’s Independence Day silence is Fanon’s prophecy made flesh: a people who were promised liberation but instead inherited a state that continues to oppress and neglect them.
And yet, this silence is not merely despair – it is also adaptation. In choosing to focus on commerce in Aba rather than parades in Abuja, Nigerians are asserting a different kind of agency. They are saying: If the state will not provide dignity, we will find it ourselves. If the flag does not feed us, we will feed ourselves. If the anthem does not protect us, we will protect one another. This is what anthropologist Jean-François Bayart once called the “politics of the belly” – a politics rooted not in abstract ideals but in the concrete realities of survival. Nigerians have learned to prioritize the belly over the banner, the market over the march, the practical over the performative.
But this adaptation comes at a cost. A nation cannot survive indefinitely on coping mechanisms alone. The erosion of patriotic rituals, the hollowing out of national pride, creates a vacuum that is filled by cynicism, tribalism, and disillusionment. When the flag no longer inspires, when the anthem no longer moves, when Independence Day is just another day in the market calendar, the very idea of Nigeria begins to wither. The unnigerianness of today is thus both a symptom and a warning: a symptom of decades of betrayal, and a warning that without a renewal of trust, the fragile threads holding this nation together may unravel entirely.
In the end, the silence of Independence Day is not just about the absence of drums or parades. It is about the absence of faith. It is the sound of a people who have shifted their allegiance from the state to themselves, from the nation to the neighborhood, from the collective dream to the individual hustle. And while this shift has allowed survival, it has also deepened the fracture between citizen and state. Unless this fracture is healed – through leadership that restores dignity, justice, and trust – the silence will only grow louder, until there is nothing left to celebrate at all.
So, where do we go from here? Sixty-five years is too long to remain on the precipice, dangling between promise and collapse, between the dream of nationhood and the nightmare of its betrayal. The question is not merely about survival – Nigeria has survived, if survival is measured in the bare fact of continued existence. The deeper question is whether Nigeria can thrive, whether it can become more than a geographical expression, more than a patchwork of resentments stitched together by colonial cartography, more than a state that extracts loyalty without offering dignity. To thrive, Nigeria must fundamentally reimagine what it means to be Nigerian. It must move beyond slogans, beyond ceremonies, beyond the hollow rituals of Independence Day parades and presidential speeches, to build a nation where every citizen feels seen, valued, and protected.
This reimagining requires a courageous return to the drawing board, a willingness to confront the foundational flaws of the Nigerian project. The first of these flaws is the over-centralization of power. Since independence, Nigeria has operated under a system that concentrates authority in Abuja, reducing states and regions to beggars at the federal table. This has not only stifled innovation and accountability but has also deepened ethnic and regional resentments. As political scientist Rotimi Suberu has argued, true federalism – not the pseudo-federalism that currently exists – requires genuine devolution of power, allowing regions and states the autonomy to develop at their own pace and in line with their unique potentials. A restructured Nigeria would not be weaker; it would be stronger, because it would allow its constituent parts to flourish rather than forcing them into a suffocating uniformity.
But restructuring alone is insufficient without a rewriting of the social contract. Nigeria’s current social contract is broken, if indeed it ever existed. The state demands allegiance, taxes, and obedience, but it fails to deliver security, justice, or opportunity. In the words of philosopher John Locke, the legitimacy of any government rests on its ability to protect the natural rights of its citizens – life, liberty, and property. Nigeria has failed on all three counts. To restore legitimacy, the social contract must be rewritten to prioritize radical inclusion, equitable justice, and tangible equity. This means not only redistributing resources more fairly but also dismantling the systems of impunity that allow the powerful to act without consequence. It means ensuring that the law is not a weapon wielded against the weak but a shield that protects the vulnerable.
Equally urgent is the reinvestment in civic education – not as a perfunctory subject in schools, but as a national project to rebuild, from the ground up, a sense of shared destiny. Civic education must go beyond teaching children how to recite the national anthem or pledge allegiance to the flag. It must cultivate critical consciousness, teaching citizens their rights and responsibilities, nurturing an ethic of accountability, and instilling the conviction that patriotism is not blind loyalty but active participation in the shaping of a just society. Paulo Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, reminds us that education is never neutral – it either domesticates or liberates. Nigeria must choose liberation, cultivating citizens who see themselves not as passive subjects of a failing state but as active agents of transformation.
Crucially, this reimagining must center the voices of the voiceless. For too long, Nigeria’s national discourse has been dominated by the elite – politicians, business magnates, and intellectuals – while the vast majority of citizens are rendered invisible. The farmer in Zamfara, the fisherwoman in Bayelsa, the street hawker in Lagos, the displaced family in Borno – these are the people whose stories must shape our national narrative. A nation that ignores its people is a nation talking to itself in an empty room. To build a genuine sense of belonging, Nigeria must consciously amplify these voices, weaving their struggles and aspirations into the fabric of national identity.
This, then, is the crux: Nigeria’s survival depends not on the resilience of its people – resilience has already been stretched to breaking point – but on the courage of its leaders and citizens to reimagine the nation itself. As Chinua Achebe once wrote, “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” But leadership here must be understood not only as the actions of those in office but as a collective responsibility. The reimagining of Nigeria cannot be outsourced to politicians alone; it must be a participatory project, owned by the people, sustained by their voices, and guided by their lived realities.
To move forward, Nigeria must embrace the paradox of its existence: that its diversity, long treated as a problem, is in fact its greatest strength; that its silence, long mistaken for apathy, is in fact a form of resistance; and that its survival, long taken for granted, is in fact contingent on radical transformation. The path ahead is not easy, but it is necessary. For if Nigeria continues on its current trajectory – clinging to empty rituals, ignoring its citizens, and refusing to confront its foundational flaws – it will not merely remain on the precipice. It will fall. And when it falls, it will not be because Nigerians lacked resilience, but because the state lacked imagination.
The work before us is not merely political; it is cultural, psychological, and deeply personal. Politics alone cannot heal the fractures of a nation whose very soul has been wounded. What is required is a tending to our bunged-up roots, a deliberate effort to clear the soil of the toxins of denial, distortion, and neglect. For too long, Nigeria has buried its traumas under silence – civil war unspoken, massacres forgotten, corruption normalized, injustices brushed aside. But roots cannot grow in poisoned soil. To rebuild, we must first create a country where the ground is fertile enough for those roots to take hold again – where history is honestly confronted, not revised to flatter the powerful; where diversity is genuinely celebrated as more than a hollow slogan, but embraced as the living heartbeat of our collective identity; and where every child, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or class, can feel that their heritage is an asset, not an obstacle.
This work is cultural because it demands a reordering of our values. We must move from a culture of impunity to one of accountability, from the worship of wealth to the honoring of integrity, from the glorification of survival-by-any-means to the celebration of shared flourishing. It is personal because it requires each of us to interrogate the ways we have internalized the failures of the state – how we have normalized dysfunction, excused injustice, or perpetuated divisions. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us in Decolonising the Mind, liberation begins with reclaiming the narratives that shape our consciousness. Nigeria must reclaim its own story, not as a tale of endless failure, but as an unfinished project still capable of renewal.
To build such a Nigeria is to create a home that one does not feel compelled to escape from in order to breathe. It is to fashion a society where migration is a choice, not an act of desperation; where the brightest minds do not see exile as the only path to dignity; where the streets of Lagos, Kano, Enugu, and Port Harcourt can hold the same promise as London, Toronto, or Houston. It is to make Nigeria not merely a place of origin, but a place of belonging. Only then will the flag rise again, not as a symbol imposed from above, but as an emblem cherished from below – rooted in the lived dignity of its people.
Nigeria at 65 is not just a milestone; it is a mirror held up to our collective soul, forcing us to confront the truths we have long evaded. It reflects not only who we are, but also the choices we have made, the compromises we have tolerated, and the promises we have betrayed. It is a mirror that does not flatter, but one that insists on honesty: the honesty of acknowledging that our nationhood remains fragile, that our unity is still contested, and that our people often feel more alienated than embraced by the very state that claims them. The unnigerianness of Nigerians – the pervasive sense of being citizens of nowhere – is not an accident of fate, but the product of decades of misrule, neglect, and the failure to craft a shared vision of belonging. Yet, this condition is not a final verdict. It is a symptom, a warning, and perhaps even an invitation to begin again.
To understand this moment, we must place Nigeria’s struggle within a broader human story. Benedict Anderson, in his seminal work Imagined Communities, reminds us that nations are not natural entities but social constructs – imagined into being through shared narratives, rituals, and symbols. Nigeria’s tragedy is that its imagination has been stunted. The stories that bind us are weak, contested, or absent altogether. Instead of a unifying narrative, we have competing memories of violence, injustice, and exclusion. The Igbo remember Biafra; the Niger Delta remembers oil exploitation; the North remembers neglect; the Middle Belt remembers massacres. Each region clings to its own wounds, while the center offers little more than slogans. If Nigeria is to become a true nation, it must reimagine itself – not as a forced amalgamation of fragments, but as a consciously chosen community of destiny.
This reimagination requires more than political restructuring; it demands a cultural renaissance. As Kwame Anthony Appiah argues in The Ethics of Identity, identity is not something we inherit passively; it is something we negotiate, shape, and affirm through our choices. Nigerian identity, then, must be actively constructed – not imposed from above, but cultivated from below. This means creating spaces where diversity is not merely tolerated but celebrated as the very essence of our strength. It means building a culture where Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Tiv, Ijaw, and countless others can see themselves not as rivals in a zero-sum game, but as co-authors of a shared story. It means elevating art, literature, music, and film as vehicles for reimagining who we are and who we might yet become. For often, it is in culture – not politics – that nations first find their soul.
But culture alone cannot carry the burden if the structures of justice remain broken. Amartya Sen, in Development as Freedom, insists that true development is not measured by GDP but by the expansion of human capabilities – the ability of citizens to live lives they value. Nigeria at 65 must confront the reality that millions of its citizens are denied this basic freedom. They are denied by insecurity that robs them of safety, by poverty that robs them of dignity, by corruption that robs them of opportunity, and by exclusion that robs them of voice. The unnigerianness we speak of is, at its core, the feeling of being locked out of the promise of freedom. To reverse this, Nigeria must commit itself to building a state that expands capabilities rather than constricts them, that empowers rather than humiliates, that protects rather than abandons.
And yet, even as we speak of structures and systems, we must not forget the deeply personal dimension of nationhood. As Václav Havel once wrote, the renewal of society begins not in abstract institutions but in the “hidden sphere” of individual conscience. Nigeria will not be reborn through constitutions alone, but through the awakening of its people to a new ethic of responsibility. Each citizen must come to see themselves not as passive victims of a failing state, but as active participants in its renewal. This requires courage – the courage to resist cynicism, the courage to demand accountability, the courage to imagine a different future. It requires a new moral imagination, one that sees beyond tribe and creed, beyond the failures of yesterday, and dares to believe that a different Nigeria is possible.
Nigeria at 65, then, is not a tombstone but a turning point. It is a call to action, a plea for transformation, and a reminder that true nationhood is not inherited – it is consciously, painstakingly, and collectively built. The mirror before us is unforgiving, but it is also merciful: it shows us not only our scars but also our possibilities. Let us meditate on this. Let us reflect, not in despair but in resolve. And let us, finally, begin the arduous but essential work of becoming a true home for all who call it by name – a home where history is confronted, diversity is celebrated, justice is real, and belonging is not a privilege but a birthright. For if we dare to reimagine, if we dare to rebuild, then perhaps Nigeria’s 65th year will not be remembered as the beginning of the end, but as the end of the beginning.
What remains after all has been said is not an ending, but a turning – a shift from reflection to possibility, from the weight of memory to the promise of becoming. Nigeria at 65 does not need another dirge of despair, nor does it deserve the hollow chorus of false celebration. What it demands is the honesty to see itself clearly, to recognize its fragile position between fracture and renewal, between the inertia of history and the urgency of tomorrow.
This moment is less a closing than an opening – an invitation to imagine what might yet be, if we dare to hold the mirror steady and not look away. The task before us is not to bury the past in silence, nor to dress it in borrowed triumphs, but to face it with unflinching eyes and to carry forward the possibility of a different future.
There is a temptation, when reflecting on Nigeria, to surrender to cynicism. The evidence of failure is abundant, the betrayals too numerous to count. Yet cynicism is itself a luxury, for it presumes the option of detachment. Most Nigerians do not have that option. The market woman cannot be cynical about the price of garri; the farmer cannot be cynical about the rains; the child in a dilapidated classroom cannot be cynical about the chalk and slate before him. Life demands engagement, however weary, however reluctant. And therein lies a paradox worth holding onto: that even in the midst of dysfunction, Nigerians continue to live, to trade, to sing, to marry, to dream. This stubborn insistence on life is not merely survival – it is a quiet defiance, a refusal to let the state’s failures extinguish the human spirit.
Perhaps, then, the true task before us is not to manufacture a false optimism but to cultivate what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope – a hope that is not naïve about the present, but that insists on the possibility of a future not yet imagined. Radical hope is not the denial of despair; it is the refusal to let despair have the final word. It is the conviction that even when the old forms have collapsed, new forms can be created; that even when the soil is barren, seeds can be planted; that even when the mirror reflects only scars, beauty can still emerge. Nigeria at 65 demands such hope – not the shallow hope of slogans, but the deep, patient hope of those who plant trees whose shade they may never sit under.
And yet, hope alone is insufficient without tenderness. Political theory often speaks in the language of power, justice, and rights, but nations are also sustained by something more intimate: the capacity to care. Emotional intelligence – our ability to feel with one another, to recognize the humanity in those who are different from us, to extend compassion across boundaries of tribe, class, and creed – is perhaps the most radical resource Nigeria has left untapped. A country cannot be built on suspicion and rivalry; it can only be built on the recognition that our fates are intertwined. The hunger of the child in Maiduguri diminishes the dignity of the banker in Lagos; the displacement of the farmer in Benue unsettles the peace of the trader in Onitsha. To feel this, to truly feel it, is to begin the work of nationhood at the level of the heart.
So let us end not with a proclamation but with an invitation: an invitation to imagine Nigeria not as a burden, but as a possibility; not as a failed inheritance, but as an unfinished creation. Let us imagine a Nigeria where silence on Independence Day is not resignation, but reflection; where the flag is not a relic, but a living emblem of dignity; where the word Nigerian is not an apology, but a source of pride. This is not a fantasy – it is a choice, one that must be made again and again, in the marketplace, in the classroom, in the ballot box, in the quiet of our consciences. For in the end, nations are not built by abstractions, but by people who dare to care, who dare to hope, and who dare to act.
And so, Nigeria at 65 is not the end of the story. It is a pause, a breath, a moment pregnant with possibility. The mirror has been held up. The question is whether we will look away in shame, or whether we will meet our own gaze with courage. The answer will not be written in constitutions or decrees alone, but in the daily choices of millions who call this land home. If we choose courage, if we choose tenderness, if we choose radical hope, then perhaps, just perhaps, the next time the flag is raised, it will not flutter in irony, but in truth. And then, at last, we may begin to feel at home in the name we have carried for so long: Nigerian.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO) is a Nigerian writer, public affairs analyst, and cultural advocate of Abiriba heritage. Trained in history and political thought in Russia, he writes on identity, governance, and civic responsibility, with essays featured across Nigeria’s leading media platforms.
