By Obi Nwakanma
Somewhere in Nigeria’s new capital city, Abuja, is a street called “Winston Churchill Street” named in honour of Britain’s famous wartime Prime Minister and Nigeria’s former colonial overlord.

To anybody with a sense of history, a street honouring Churchill in Nigeria’s capital city is an oddity.

Here is why: Winston Churchill strenuously opposed freedom and independence for Nigeria and the other colonies.

In fact in 1945 in San Francisco at the formation of the United Nations, Churchill forcefully sought to re-interpret the meaning of the Atlantic Charter, for which Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe essayed that challenge to the British Prime Minister in his famous essay declaring “Africans did not fight in the last war so that only Europeans would enjoy freedom.”

In the same token, the planners and administrators of Nigeria’s new capital city have never thought even as a symbolic gesture to name a street in honour of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The irony is intriguing, for it was this American president who, in 1945, unambiguously championed the rights of freedom for the colonized, declaring to Churchill, that America would not support  or stand aside while Britain denied the rights of the colonies to political freedom.

There are many among historians of the 20th century who believe that had Roosevelt lived; if he had not died on his way from the council of Yalta, that newly decolonized states would have had a fairer deal than they eventually got.

The irony as I’ve noted is, whereas Churchill is honoured with a street named after him in Nigeria’s capital, none honours Roosevelt. It is not remarkable for such revisionisms follow Nigeria’s national history, in which the true heroes of the nation are ignored, while its villains are celebrated with plinths mounted in their names.

Just this week, Mr. Yayale Ahmed released the list of 50 Nigerians whom he said Nigeria honours. It is either that Mr. Ahmed does not really know Nigeria’s political and cultural history or he chooses to invert or ignore it in drawing this list. There was no Mbonu Ojike, no Kola Balogun; no Adegoke Adelabu, key Nigerian nationalists of the 20th century.

The records show that besides Zik in the 1940s, there was none more forceful and more central in Nigeria’s anticolonial nationalist struggle than Mazi Mbonu Ojike; Adegoke “penkelemesi” Adelabu and Kola Balogun.

There was no Akanu Ibiam; no Kingsley Ozuomba Mbadiwe; no Nwafor Orizu; no Louis Nwachukwu Mbanefo; no M.I. Okpara; no Eyo Ita; no Sir Louis Ojukwu; no Mobolaji  Bank-Anthony; no Raji Abdallah or Saad Zungur or Aminu Kano or Kashim Ibrahim; no Michael Imoudu; no Simeon Adebo; no Alvan Ikoku; no Pius Okigbo, no Eni Njoku, or any of the key leaders of the radical Zikist movement on that list.

There was not even a mention of that nationalist clerk, who tried to assassinate Hugh Foot, the colonial secretary, as a singular act of anti-colonial defiance and died in the colonial mental asylum in Yaba where he was locked.

There was no Israel Woba Njemanze; no Ben Enwonwu; no Fela Sowande. Yet we have on it many who should live in infamy. This fact indeed also reflects quite perfectly the Nigerian contradiction. It is the year of our jubilee – 50 years after political independence – and there is nothing to celebrate except the agony of failed nationhood and missed opportunities. Nigerians are not celebrating. Let us be very plain with the truth, there is not much to celebrate.

There are Nigerians who today feel that Nigeria should not exist; that it is an unworkable mishmash of peoples who still cling to their primordial affiliation; that there is no nation to speak of.

That may be true. But truer still is that the infrastructure of nationhood which we inherited has not been built up to absorb and produce a transcendent national consciousness; a national myth to which all margins might unify.

True, colonialism exploited and destabilized us historically, but we must be quite clear, that the British left us with some useful and indeed solid institutions: an efficient civil service, some great schools, an emergent national culture, and there are those who might argue, yes, access to an international language. That last part some may also argue was a left handed gift.

But for whatever it is worth Nigeria began life as a new nation with an urgency which, as Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu has said, aimed at “startling the world.” But 50  years down the road, we have made a thorough mess of the institutions we inherited. Our hospitals are dead. Our universities are a joke.

Our public schools infrastructure is primitive and an insult to our children; our civil service is inefficient and corrupt, and our cities are ugly and poisoned; our national Railways and Postal Services are in ruins, and our nation is mired in conflict; ethnic and religious rivalries, insecurity, poverty, unemployment; our national patrimony has been frittered; Nigeria’s national public investments sold off bit by bit to both local and international oligopolies and cronies under the fraudulent guise of privatization. Nigeria is, to put it bluntly, a cesspit of evil. Evil struts in a land in which 15  toddlers were kidnapped in South-Eastern Nigeria for ransom in the week of its jubilee. So, who is celebrating this jubilee?

In 1979, I was among the children who marched at the Government fields in Umuahia celebrating the “International Year of the Child.” They said then, 31 years ago, that we were the future; leaders of tomorrow. Today, I and my generation are middle aged men and women.

We arrived at a stolen future. Nigeria celebrates 50 years of tragic failure. We must not gloss over this fact. In deed, it is part of the great charade that has characterized this country, whose prospects seems increasingly to look like the future of Haiti. The historical similarities are so totally intriguing.

Nigeria bungles everything. Let us draw an example of Ghana’s own jubilee three years ago. The pure elegance and symbolism of it drew new attention to the potentials of Ghana.

They did not spend the kind of billions that Nigeria’s government has budgeted and spent for frivolities. Yet, there has to be something more than despair. Despair is easy, and it is futile. We have failed and we cannot escape that fact. Nigeria’s failure however must compel a new generation which must start now to rebuild.

To rebuild and prepare this country for its centenary as a free nation, we must sweep away the muck. Among the muck are the deadwood politicians, failed “radicals,” bogus intellectuals ; they have nothing else to offer Nigeria but the last fifty years – the failure of their imagination and the limits of their abilities.

This is indeed the year of our jubilee. While we have not much of value to celebrate, a new Nigeria must nonetheless emerge from this ruin. This generation must retrieve Nigeria from the pit and from the vice grip of the scoundrels who have raped her. This is the urgent task of now.