NIGERIA is frequently celebrated as the ‘Giant of Africa’. Nigeria is a nation richly endowed with human and natural resources – huge intellectual capital, a vibrant youthful population, immense cultural diversity, fertile agricultural land, and a seemingly limitless oil wealth. Yet, despite these extraordinary blessings, millions of Nigerians continue to live under unbelievable conditions of poverty, insecurity, unemployment, hunger, hopelessness, and infrastructural decay.
This contradiction remains both painful and difficult to reconcile. How does a nation so richly endowed produce citizens who struggle daily for the bare essentials of existence? Why does abundance coexist so visibly with deprivation?
The late Festus Iyayi devoted much of his literary career to exposing this social tragedy. In works such as Violence and The Contract, Iyayi portrayed a society in which the ruling class enriches itself through corruption while the poor are condemned to perpetual suffering. His writings demonstrate how state contracts intended for national development become instruments for embezzlement and elite accumulation. Nigeria’s tragedy, Iyayi contends, lies not merely in the existence of corruption, but in its normalisation.
The answer, as many Nigerian intellectuals and progressive thinkers have consistently argued, lies fundamentally in the crisis of leadership, the institutionalisation of corruption, and the systematic exploitation of citizens by successive generation of the ruling elite.
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The title of this discourse may appear harsh, yet it accurately reflects the contemporary Nigerian condition. Since independence up to now, Nigerians have repeatedly endured internal exploitation, manipulation, neglect, and economic subjugation at the hands of leaders who perpetually see public office not as a platform for service, but as an avenue for personal accumulation and political domination.
Even the immediate post-independence era, often glorified as the golden era of Nigeria’s altruistic leadership cannot be entirely absolved of this historical failure. Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People and Lee Kuan Yew’s reflections on Nigeria in his From Third World To First both illuminate how early political betrayals laid the foundation for the crises that continue to haunt the nation.
Achebe essentially captured this tragedy with remarkable clarity in The Trouble With Nigeria, where he famously declared that “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” Decades after that diagnosis, the corruption infection and its other dangerous variants remain stubbornly resistant and incurable. Nigerian leaders continue to preside over a political order characterised by weak accountability, abandoned projects, monetised elections, institutional decay, and the sacrifice of public welfare on the altar of private greed.
The brazen impunity of the Nigerian leadership has so hypnotised and reduced Nigerians to a people conquered and enslaved in their own country – paying taxes without receiving services, voting in leaders who are not accountable to them, suffering without social and economic justice, and enduring governance perpetually reproducing inequality.
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Corruption has evolved beyond isolated misconduct into a deeply entrenched culture. Roads are repeatedly budgeted for yet remain uncompleted, and if completed, poorly executed. Hospitals are commissioned without equipment rendering them centres of centres of death. Schools deteriorate from neglect. Electricity projects consume enormous public funds while darkness persists. Public refineries undergo endless multi-billion- or trillion-naira “turnaround maintenance”. Defence and security infrastructure so weakened and structured for the ruling elite to a degree that the rest of us are overwhelmed by a tensed and clear atmosphere of siege. Meanwhile, people in positions of authority perpetuating this perfidy continue to accumulate extraordinary wealth with astonishing impunity while ordinary citizens are urged to “endure hardship” in the name of economic reform.
This pattern increasingly resembles a relationship between supreme rulers and subjects rather than leaders and citizens. During elections, impoverished citizens are often induced with food items, wrappers, and small sums of money in exchange for political mandates that are later weaponised against them.
Until leaders begin to see themselves as servants rather than masters, and until citizens reject both political and economic subjugation, Nigeria’s democratic experience will continue to operate as organised oppression disguised as freedom. No nation can progress when its leaders feed parasitically upon the people. Nor can democracy thrive where citizens are reduced to instruments of political survival rather than recognised as stakeholders in national development.
The late Festus Iyayi devoted much of his literary career to exposing this social tragedy. In works such as Violence and The Contract, Iyayi portrayed a society in which the ruling class enriches itself through corruption while the poor are condemned to perpetual suffering. His writings demonstrate how state contracts intended for national development become instruments for embezzlement and elite accumulation. Nigeria’s tragedy, Iyayi suggests, lies not merely in the existence of corruption, but in its normalisation.
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Indeed, the Nigerian citizen has become economically trapped within a deeply unequal system. Workers labour relentlessly yet remain poor, persistently unable to attain decent living standards. Inflation rises continuously while wages stagnate. Graduates ride commercial motorcycles for survival. Families generate private electricity because public power systems have collapsed. Citizens fund private security because policing is ineffective. They drilled their boreholes because public water boards have largely failed. They finance private education because public schools have deteriorated. In practical terms, Nigerians increasingly provide for themselves what government ought to guarantee as a social obligation.
It is gone far beyond time for Nigerians, as citizens, and not subjects or slave, to recover a collective sense of ownership of the nation. Nigerians have been very passive, and passive citizenship enables exploitative governance. Democracy cannot flourish where citizens surrender their rights in exchange for temporary material favours.
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The American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, argued that true patriotism lies not in blind obedience to authority, but in active moral responsibility toward society. Thoreau insists in his essay, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ that when a government becomes unjust or indifferent to the welfare of citizens, the citizens possess not merely a right but a civic duty to resist complacency and reclaim democratic accountability.
Achebe, Soyinka, Iyayi, Osundare, Osofisan and other revolutionary writers all understood this fundamental truth. Literature, as well as History, are not merely instruments entertainment record of the past, but weapons against injustice. Their writings challenge Nigerians to confront uncomfortable truths about corruption, inequality, leadership failure, and national decline.
Nigeria’s tragedy is not the absence of resources, but the absence of ethical and visionary leadership. The country’s underdevelopment is largely man-made – produced by greed, incompetence, selfishness, systemic corruption, and exploitative political structures.
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Until leaders begin to see themselves as servants rather than masters, and until citizens reject both political and economic subjugation, Nigeria’s democratic experience will continue to operate as organised oppression deodorised as democracy. No nation can progress when its leaders feed so parasitically upon the people as is the case in Nigeria. Nor can democracy thrive where citizens are reduced to mere instruments of political survival rather than recognised as stakeholders in national development.
The future of Nigeria depends on breaking this vicious cycle of exploitation, dependency, and institutional decay. The shackles may no longer be forged from iron, as it was in the era of slave trade, but they persist in the forms of endemic poverty, suffocating corruption, unemployment, cronyism, economic dependency, and state failure.
Until those shackles are broken, Nigerians may continue to live not as truly free citizens, but as conquered and enslaved people in their own land.
Onah is the Editor-in-Chief of NATIONAL RECORD and writes this column every Wednesday.
