BY LANRE OGUNDIPE
SIXTY-SIX years!
In the life of a human being, 66 is the evening season of quiet reflection, a time to sit back, take stock of the journey, watch the fruit of one’s labour mature and hope that the younger generation will inherit a stable and prosperous house.
But in the life of our republic, 66 feels less like a milestone than an endurance test. It is an exhausting twilight in which a richly endowed nation continues to grope in the dark, searching for its bearings and wondering why a country so abundantly blessed should still struggle to provide the ordinary dignity its citizens deserve.
A country of Nigeria’s population and industrial ambition cannot measure its energy future merely by whether the system has improved from yesterday. It must ask whether the electricity available is sufficient, reliable and affordable enough to power factories, hospitals, schools, technology companies and millions of small businesses.
How else does one capture the national mood?
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Everywhere one turns, the air is thick with lament. We are a people trapped in a cruel paradox, sitting atop immense natural and human resources while increasingly having to calculate the cost of almost every basic necessity of life.
The official numbers tell one story. The marketplace often tells another.
The National Bureau of Statistics now puts headline inflation at 15.39 per cent under the rebased Consumer Price Index. That represents a substantial improvement from the punishing inflation rates of recent years, and it would be intellectually dishonest to deny the significance of that movement. Real GDP also grew by 3.89 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2026. There are, therefore, measurable signs of economic movement.
But this is where the national conversation must become more honest.
Growth in an economic table is not necessarily recovery in the household.
Food inflation remains considerably higher at 19.57 per cent. For the family whose income has already been eroded by years of rising prices, a lower inflation rate does not mean that food has suddenly become cheap. It means, more modestly, that the rate at which prices are rising has slowed.
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What does that distinction mean to the mother standing in a market calculating whether the money in her purse can buy enough food for the family?
What does it mean to the pensioner whose fixed income has to compete with rising medical costs?
What does it mean to the small business owner whose revenue must still contend with electricity, transport, rent, taxes, security and the cost of replacing equipment?
This is where macroeconomic language can become dangerously detached from human experience.
A falling inflation rate is welcome. Economic growth is welcome. Reform is welcome. But citizens are entitled to ask a more demanding question: when will these improvements become sufficiently visible in the ordinary economics of daily life?
That question is not an attack on statistics. It is precisely why statistics exist.
Numbers are supposed to illuminate reality, not replace it.
The same tension can be seen in the electricity sector. There has been measurable progress in areas such as metering, with national metering reaching 61.51 per cent by the end of June 2026. NERC also reported average available grid capacity of 4,758 MW in August. These are useful indicators of movement in a sector that has frustrated Nigeria for generations.
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But the existence of improvement does not erase the larger question of adequacy.
A country of Nigeria’s population and industrial ambition cannot measure its energy future merely by whether the system has improved from yesterday. It must ask whether the electricity available is sufficient, reliable and affordable enough to power factories, hospitals, schools, technology companies and millions of small businesses.
That is the difference between movement and transformation.
And that takes us to the more uncomfortable question: why are we still here?
Why does a country with oil, gas, fertile land, a vast market and extraordinary human talent continue to struggle with the fundamentals of electricity, food security, employment, affordable healthcare, functional infrastructure and personal security?
The answer cannot simply be that Nigeria is unlucky.
Nor can every failure be explained away by the latest global crisis.
For decades, governance has too often been treated as an avenue for elite competition rather than as a public trust. We have become remarkably good at managing symptoms while leaving the underlying disease largely intact.
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We manage power shortages instead of building an electricity system capable of sustaining industrial expansion.
We distribute palliatives when citizens need productive opportunities.
We celebrate isolated infrastructure projects while the wider systems required to make those investments productive remain weak.
We watch our doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, technologists and young professionals leave in search of environments where their education and labour can command greater dignity and reward.
This is not merely a migration story.
It is a warning about what happens when a nation repeatedly educates people it cannot adequately employ, support or retain.
A country that frustrates its young people eventually exports its future.
And the irony is difficult to escape. The same country that loses skilled Nigerians to foreign economies continues to complain about shortages of doctors, engineers, teachers, researchers and technical specialists at home.
The loss is not simply the departure of individuals.
It is the loss of years of public and private investment in education, training and professional development.
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Meanwhile, we import what we should manufacture, borrow to sustain expenditure that ought to be supported by stronger domestic production, and repeatedly wrap structural weaknesses in impressive political vocabulary.
We call it reform.
We call it renewal.
We call it transformation.
We call it recovery.
But the ordinary citizen is entitled to ask a simpler question:
Where is the result?
A true compass is designed to guide a traveller through difficult terrain. It does not remove the storm, but it tells the traveller where north lies.
Until we cast away the broken playbooks, confront impunity, strengthen institutions and place the common good above the narrow interests of those who temporarily control public power, our national compass will continue to spin. And we will remain, not strangers in the land of our birth, but citizens of a country that knows where it wants to go and still cannot seem to find its way there.
Our national problem is not that Nigeria lacks direction on paper.
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We have had development plans, economic blueprints, reform programmes, policy documents, committees and commissions enough to fill entire libraries.
The deeper problem is the persistent distance between declared direction and actual destination.
Every political cycle arrives with a new vocabulary of hope. New promises are made. New targets are announced. New programmes are unveiled.
Then citizens wait.
Some improvements occur. Some reforms produce results. Some institutions perform better than others. Nigeria is not a country without achievement, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
But the larger national question remains unresolved: why does progress so often appear as isolated islands in a sea of institutional weakness?
Why must Nigerians continue to celebrate the restoration of things that should have worked in the first place?
Why does basic governance still feel like an achievement rather than an obligation?
At 66, our collective lament is therefore not simply about poverty of the purse.
It is also about poverty of purpose.
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A nation can be rich in resources and poor in direction. It can be populated by exceptionally talented people and still be governed by systems that waste their potential. It can possess immense possibilities and yet repeatedly fail to convert possibility into prosperity.
That is the tragedy of Nigeria.
But there is another truth that must be acknowledged.
Nigeria is not standing still.
The economy is growing. Inflation has moderated from its recent highs. Electricity regulation and metering are producing measurable changes. Manufacturing and other sectors continue to record periods of growth. The country has shown, repeatedly, that when institutions, capital and human ingenuity align, Nigerians can produce results.
The problem is that these gains have not yet become sufficiently broad, dependable and durable to alter the fundamental experience of too many citizens.
That is why optimism alone is not enough.
Nor is despair.
What Nigeria needs is direction.
We are not groping in the dark because there is no light.
We are groping because we have not consistently built institutions capable of keeping the light on.
The answer cannot be another slogan.
It cannot be another political season of promises followed by another season of explanations.
Sixty-six years of independence demands something more demanding from us: an honest reckoning with what has worked, what has failed and why. It demands institutions that outlive personalities. It demands public leadership that understands power as responsibility rather than privilege. It demands an economy that rewards production rather than merely consumption. It demands electricity that supports industry, education that produces capability, healthcare that protects lives, security that allows citizens to sleep, and public institutions that work whether or not a particular individual is occupying an office. Above all, it demands a national compass that points in one direction and stays there.
Hope remains possible. Indeed, Nigeria’s history is itself evidence that Nigerians possess extraordinary capacity to survive, adapt and rebuild.
But hope cannot be reduced to optimism.
Hope must eventually become policy, institution, discipline and measurable results.
At 66, Nigeria does not need another birthday speech telling us how great we can become.
We know what we can become.
What we need is the courage to confront why we have not yet become it.
Until we cast away the broken playbooks, confront impunity, strengthen institutions and place the common good above the narrow interests of those who temporarily control public power, our national compass will continue to spin. And we will remain, not strangers in the land of our birth, but citizens of a country that knows where it wants to go and still cannot seem to find its way there.
