MOURNING THE THINGS THAT WEREN'T

I wish the British left us as the Northern and Southern protectorates that they met us as when they came in 1846 without amalgamating us to become Nigeria in 1914. We most probably wouldn’t have had ethnicity and religion as foremost problems now.

I wish the January 1966 coup was completely successful. I wish Madiebo didn’t successfully convince Nzeogwu not to take the fight to Ironsi after the latter had taken control of the government in Lagos. With the blueprint the coup-plotters had mapped out for Nigeria, we most likely would have had an economy similar to Russia and China’s by now if that blueprint was executed to the letter.

I wish Ironsi had kept the end of the bargain he made with Nzeogwu before the latter surrendered to him. If Ironsi had kept the deal, Awolowo and the rest of the imprisoned Southern opposition would have been released; the families of the slain victims of the January 1966 coup would have been taken care of by the government and the subsequent May 1966 riots and July 1966 coup may never have occurred.

NIGERIA AT 100: WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE CELEBRATING?

It’s a very sad me typing this right now. Just when I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that $20 billion of our commonwealth had been stolen and we weren’t ever going to get it back, since the whistle-blower aka noisy CBN governor had been ousted, I learnt about the gruesome killing of over 50 teenagers in a Federal Government College in Yobe state by the Boko Haram sect with 20 girl children abducted in the process ( as I write this, I’m pondering with fear what exactly those girls, if they are still alive, will be going through right now). I lived in the boarding house of a Federal Government College for three years myself and I still remember vividly the few and far between times we heard stories like a man coming into the hostel to rape girls and the beating of some supposed  student witches by fellow students and the kind of fear those stories put me in for days and weeks. So I can’t even begin to imagine what those teenage students experienced that dark night. I was still in shock about the incident when I learnt the Boko Haram sect had invaded a village in Adamawa and slaughtered over 20 people. All these in less than one week! At that point, I wasn’t sure my heart could take any more bad news from Nigeria, preferring to just read about happenings around the world from CNN and co. Only for me stumble across a news item that the Federal Government had drawn up a list of 100 people for Centenary awards that will be handed out during the 100 years’ of Nigeria. Centenary what? I quickly found the list on the internet and on skimming it, it dawned on me that even after 100 years of being a country- and more than 53 years of being independent- we still don’t have a clue of what we are doing or where we are headed.