Nigeria at 60: Celebration of progress or that of retrogression -By Elijah Adetoyese

1st of October, 1960 is, without doubt, a remarkable day in the chronicle of our dear land. It was the day the nurtured thought of liberty was birth into a wholesome and promising reality.

Our Independence movement heroes stood shoulders’ high in the face of slavery and somewhat epical rule of her colonial master. They fought to free our land from the unending dominion of the White. A fight for liberty, a fight to stand as human, and stop feasting on the crumbs let down from the many resources our land yielded to their gain.

We were all happy. Freedom for all can now be achieved. The thought of being ruled by people of the same belief, color, and ideology got us revved up. We felt at ease and danced to the rhythmical beat of what we knew as freedom. If the emancipation from the rule of the White is to be the true meaning of freedom, then, for once, we got it all right.

While we celebrate the 60th good year of a glorious manumission from our colonial masters. It is worth knowing the significance the freedom has caused us. It is necessary we evaluate where we are coming from, where we are, and to which end we are headed.

Of a truth, the country Nigeria has evolved and she is still very much in the process of making more progress in the geometrical upsurge in the numbers of her occupants. While that is a plus, it is quite disheartening that Nigeria is crowned as the poverty capital of the world with about, 90 million people- roughly half Nigeria’s population living in extreme poverty, according to estimate from the World Data Lab’s Poverty Clock.

Not that alone, Nigerians are undergoing an epical show of shame, to be comfortably placed as the third amongst the notorious zones of the world most affected by terrorists, after her counterparts, Iraq and Afghanistan. This shows the sorry state of the security of lives of her citizenry. As Jane Addams said, “…of all aspects of social misery, nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment”. A nation with little or no employments enabling environment for her citizenry is creating official recruitment for more terrorists.

Conclusively, As a 60-year-old man or woman is presumed to have grown in maturity and development. So, it is about time, my fellow patriots, we rose bravely to defend the livelong legacy bequeathed to us by our past heroes, by building a sustainable environment worthy of living.