By Philip Obazee

Happy Independence Day to Nigerians everywhere.

Sixty-six years have passed, yet certain details of October 1, 1960, remain as vivid to me as though the intervening decades had barely disturbed them. I remember a cup decorated with the green and white of the Nigerian flag, and a small Nigerian flag of its own. Both were made of remarkably good-quality plastic. They were simple objects, but to a child participating in that celebration, they carried an importance far beyond their size.

Then there was the food: rice served with curried goat-meat stew, generously portioned for every pupil at the celebration, with enough to eat and enough to take home. That generosity has stayed with me. The day seemed to announce that there would be something for everyone in the country whose independence we were celebrating.

Looking back, I recognise how much of my first understanding of independence was contained in that meal. Freedom had been made tangible. It had colour, substance and a place for children. We were being invited to share in the happiness of a country taking possession of its future.

The pomp and pageantry of that occasion remain unequalled in my own experience. Other celebrations have come and gone, but none has displaced the impression of that first Independence Day. Nigeria seemed to be announcing itself with the confidence of a people who believed that the world had yet to discover the full extent of their abilities. The mood, as I remember it, amounted to a declaration: You have not seen anything yet.

Today, the distance between that confidence and our subsequent history is impossible to ignore. Yet the memory does more than remind me of what has disappointed us. It reminds me of what we once considered possible—and of the obligation to make that possibility real.

My attachment to Nigeria rests partly in that remembered joy, but my confidence in its future must rest on something more substantial. At sixty-six, the country deserves an affection capable of telling the truth and a criticism capable of imagining improvement.

What That Day Promised

Nigeria’s independence from Britain on October 1, 1960, followed a long struggle for political representation and control over the country’s affairs. It was a constitutional achievement, but its meaning extended well beyond the transfer of formal authority. It affirmed that Nigerians were entitled to govern themselves and to assume responsibility for the society they wished to build. 

That affirmation mattered in its own right. Subsequent failures of government cannot make colonial subordination desirable in retrospect. A people’s entitlement to freedom does not depend on their first proving that they will exercise it without mistakes. Independence established a right; responsible government was the continuing duty that came with it.

Nor did our history begin when the colonial flag came down. The peoples brought together within Nigeria already possessed histories of government, commerce, craftsmanship and cultural achievement. Benin, to take one example, had developed extensive trading networks and distinguished artistic traditions centuries before the modern Nigerian state existed. Independence marked a new political beginning for peoples whose contributions to civilisation were already substantial. 

The task was to bring those inheritances into a shared future.

For a child, of course, these distinctions were beyond the immediate excitement of the occasion. What registered was the sense that something important belonged to us. The cup, the flag and the generous meal made the national celebration personal.

I would not turn that recollection into an economic claim that Nigeria in 1960 enjoyed abundance everywhere. A childhood celebration cannot establish the living conditions of an entire country. What it can preserve is the character of a promise. In my memory, independence came with the expectation that national freedom would eventually enlarge ordinary people’s opportunities and improve their lives.

That expectation remains a sound standard by which to judge the country.

The practical meaning of independence should become visible in the confidence with which a family plans its future. It should appear in a child’s access to education, in the security of a farmer returning to the land, in the ability of a business to expand without purchasing political favour, and in the assurance that illness will not automatically become financial ruin.

These are ambitions worthy of a sovereign people. The splendour of a national ceremony is most meaningful when the life awaiting its participants afterwards bears some relationship to the dignity being proclaimed.

A Difficult History 

Nigeria’s history since independence has included grave failures. The military upheavals of 1966, the civil war of 1967–1970 and the long periods of military government inflicted losses that no anniversary address should soften into a passing inconvenience. The return to civilian government in 1999 was an important achievement, but the earlier destruction remains part of the country’s historical inheritance. 

The phrase chequered history can become too comfortable. It compresses into two words experiences that were neither brief nor abstract for those who endured them. War means bereavement, hunger, displacement and lives permanently altered. Political repression means that people paid a price for insisting that public power should have limits.

An honest patriotism must make room for those memories alongside the happier ones.

I can recall the exhilaration of independence without asking another Nigerian to suppress the history of what followed. Our common country must be large enough to accommodate both. A national story that recognises only celebration becomes propaganda; one that recognises only catastrophe becomes an inadequate account of the people who lived through it.

Perspective also matters. Nigeria’s difficulties do not establish that Nigerians are uniquely incapable of building a successful society. The American Civil War of 1861–1865 offers a stark reminder that even countries later associated with great power have experienced devastating internal conflict. Their eventual strength should not obscure the severity of their earlier divisions. 

Such comparisons are useful only when they encourage learning. They become evasions when deployed to suggest that Nigerians should endure another generation of avoidable failure because other societies once suffered too.

We should study how countries corrected destructive arrangements, widened opportunity and made public authority more accountable. There is no virtue in reproducing their suffering before adopting their lessons.

Sixty-six years is also too long to treat every shortcoming as the understandable confusion of a newly independent country. It represents most or all of a lifetime for many citizens. A nation may possess a distant horizon; a child’s opportunity to receive a sound education arrives on a much less forgiving timetable.

Time alone will not repair Nigeria. Improvement requires decisions, implementation and the willingness to confront interests that benefit from existing failures. Nevertheless, the fact that those failures have persisted does not make them permanent features of our identity.

History explains how we arrived here. It does not relieve us of responsibility for where we go next.

Why I Still Believe

My confidence in Nigeria does not depend on an assumption that Nigerians possess some exceptional national virtue unavailable to other peoples. It rests on the more practical conviction that the country contains abilities that can produce far better collective results under better conditions.

There is already evidence of achievement beyond the language of promise. Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 belongs to the record of accomplished Nigerian excellence, rather than to a catalogue of what Nigerians might someday achieve. The international reach of Nigerian music and film offers further evidence that work created from within our society can command audiences far beyond it. 

These achievements deserve celebration for their own sake. They also challenge the habit of treating Nigeria as a place from which the world should expect little beyond its problems.

Yet a national argument cannot rest entirely on distinguished individuals. A country can produce celebrated writers, performers and professionals while leaving much of its population poorly served. The more demanding question is whether Nigerians can organise institutions that work.

Consider the response to Ebola in 2014. Nigerian health authorities, state governments, medical professionals and international partners assembled a coordinated effort involving laboratory testing, contact tracing, treatment and public communication. The response drew on existing public-health experience and used an emergency operations structure to organise responsibilities and decisions. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak over in Nigeria on October 20, 2014. 

One detail from the published account is particularly instructive: the incident manager was selected for relevant experience and competence rather than rank in government or public service. That is a practical illustration of what becomes possible when the demands of the task govern the choice of the person responsible for it. 

The response was neither effortless nor flawless. Its significance lies in showing that Nigerian institutions and professionals could coordinate effectively under difficult circumstances. The reasonable conclusion is not that one success resolves every institutional weakness. It is that effective organisation is within our demonstrated capabilities.

That gives optimism a firmer foundation.

We should examine such successes with the same seriousness we bring to failure. What authority did capable people receive? How were responsibilities assigned? How were mistakes detected? Which arrangements allowed cooperation across organisations? How can those arrangements become more durable?

A country learns little when every failure is treated as proof of its essential character and every success is dismissed as an exception too unusual to matter.

There is also a less celebrated form of national worth that deserves recognition. We should honour the teacher who takes a child’s understanding seriously, the professional who refuses to falsify a result, the public servant who treats an ordinary applicant fairly, and the employer who meets an obligation when evasion would be easier.

These actions rarely become national spectacles. They are nevertheless the conduct from which a trustworthy society must be built. Our standards of recognition should give them greater weight.

Turning Determination into Achievement

Determination is indispensable, but it needs an environment in which effort can accumulate into something lasting.

Consider a small manufacturer. Reliable electricity allows equipment to be used more consistently. Dependable transport makes delivery commitments easier to keep. Enforceable contracts make it safer to deal with unfamiliar customers. Predictable rules allow investment decisions to extend beyond the next immediate uncertainty.

Each improvement increases the usefulness of the others. A better road has greater value when a business can produce enough to supply a larger market. Training is more valuable when firms can employ the skills acquired. Finance can support expansion more effectively when investors have some confidence in the rules under which the enterprise will operate.

This is how individual industry becomes national prosperity: through arrangements that allow people’s efforts to reinforce one another.

Conversely, whenever a household or business must privately replace a basic public service, part of its income is diverted from other purposes. Money devoted to compensating for institutional failure cannot simultaneously finance education, new machinery or a more secure retirement. The ability to improvise around an obstacle may be admirable, but removing the obstacle is usually the more important achievement.

We should therefore be careful about the demands we attach to the word resilience. It ought to honour people who have endured difficulty, rather than excuse those responsible for making difficulty unnecessarily persistent.

Nigerians deserve the opportunity to benefit from their determination without having to prove it through endless adversity.

This requires a more exacting understanding of government. Public office should be judged by delivery: whether a service works, whether money reaches its intended purpose, whether a project is maintained, and whether citizens receive fair treatment. The announcement of an initiative is the beginning of an obligation, not evidence that the obligation has been fulfilled.

The same discipline should guide our assessment of economic reform. In its April 2026 Nigeria Development Update, the World Bank recognised progress in restoring macroeconomic stability while also observing that household incomes had not fully recovered and poverty remained high. Its assessment placed investment in people, including early childhood development, at the centre of translating stabilisation into better lives. 

Both parts of that assessment deserve attention. Improvements in economic management matter, because durable prosperity requires a workable financial foundation. The household’s experience matters equally, because that foundation must eventually support a life people can recognise as better.

A family experiences economic progress through the purchasing power of its income, the security of its work and the opportunities available to its children. National policy earns lasting credibility when improvement becomes visible in those terms.

That is one reason my Independence Day memory returns so insistently to the meal. The promise of the occasion reached the child. Our larger national undertakings should be judged by whether their benefits also reach the people in whose name they are made.

A Country That Belongs to All Its People

Prosperity requires more than competent administration. It also requires a sense that the country belongs fairly to those expected to build it.

People have stronger reasons to invest in a common future when their rights do not depend on the political fortunes of their ethnic group, region or religion. A Nigerian should be able to establish a home, earn a living and participate in community life without being made to feel permanently conditional in belonging.

Our differences need neither disappearance nor denial. The task is to organise public life so that those differences do not determine the basic worth of a citizen.

A shared national identity becomes credible through experience. It grows when a person receives justice without a powerful intermediary, when public resources are allocated transparently, and when losing an election does not mean losing the protection of the state. It weakens whenever access to opportunity appears to depend on proximity to those who control public office.

For that reason, unity should be treated as something continually earned through fairness. Speeches can affirm it; institutions must give people reasons to trust it.

Federalism should serve that purpose. Its value lies in allowing communities meaningful responsibility for their affairs while preserving the protections and opportunities of common citizenship. The appropriate test is whether government becomes more responsive and accountable, rather than whether an additional layer of officeholders acquires greater discretion.

Citizens also have obligations. We cannot reasonably demand standards from public institutions while celebrating their violation whenever the beneficiary happens to be someone we support. An honest official from another community is a greater public asset than a dishonest one who shares our ancestry.

But responsibility must remain proportionate to power. An ordinary citizen cannot individually repair the electricity system, secure a highway or enforce a judgment against a powerful offender. National renewal requires public leadership to perform the functions for which it possesses authority and resources.

The useful civic contribution is to sustain standards, support capable people, scrutinise public decisions and resist the invitation to turn every question of performance into a quarrel over identity.

Whether we live at home or abroad, our attachment to Nigeria should find expression in something more constructive than either habitual condemnation or unconditional defence. Knowledge can be shared. Enterprise can be built. Institutions can be supported. Public arguments can be made more honest.

There is room for many forms of service. What matters is that they improve the country’s capacity to offer its citizens a decent life.

The Meaning of Greatness

When I speak of Nigeria’s eventual greatness, I do not mean that its people must live permanently in competition for the approval of outsiders. International respect is welcome, but it is an insufficient national purpose.

Nor should we accept the contempt contained in the old expression “the dark continent” as the background against which African achievement must forever explain itself. Our humanity requires no external certification. Our ambitions should arise from what we owe one another and what we are capable of contributing to the world.

Greatness should be visible first in the quality of ordinary life.

It should mean that a child can develop an ability without being defeated by the circumstances of birth. It should mean that people can travel, work, worship and disagree without living in unreasonable fear. It should mean that public institutions remain dependable when the person seeking their help has no name of consequence to mention.

A successful Nigeria would also contribute generously beyond its borders. Its learning, enterprise, culture and discoveries could enlarge human welfare elsewhere. That is a worthy place to seek among the nations: a country respected both for what it enables its own people to become and for what it adds to the lives of others.

This ambition is sufficiently large without requiring a claim of inevitable destiny. Its seriousness comes from the work we are prepared to undertake on its behalf.

The Promise We Owe the Next Generation

Those of us who remember October 1, 1960, have a responsibility to preserve the confidence of that day without asking younger Nigerians to borrow our emotions.

They are entitled to judge the country through their own experiences. A young person facing an uncertain future cannot be expected to find reassurance simply because an older person remembers a magnificent beginning. Our memories become useful when they sharpen our sense of obligation to those who must live with the results of our decisions.

I would like the children of today to possess happy national memories of their own. More importantly, I would like those memories to be supported by dependable opportunities.

They should be able to look back on childhood and recall that the adults around them took their future seriously. They should inherit schools worth attending, public institutions worth trusting and a society in which honest effort has a reasonable prospect of reward.

That would give the celebrations their fullest meaning.

I still treasure the cup, the little flag and the generous serving of rice with curried goat-meat stew—not as objects I need physically to possess, but as details that time has failed to erase. They preserve the feeling of a day on which the future seemed openand Nigeria appeared ready to claim it.

The years since then have complicated that feeling. They have not extinguished it.

I remain confident that Nigerians can build a country worthy of the expectation with which independence began. That confidence asks something of us. It asks that we recognise competence, demand accountability, protect one another’s belonging and give our children reasons to expect more than endurance.

Our chequered history contains warnings that must be heeded. It also contains achievements from which to learn and capacities on which to build. Neither the failures of government nor the condescension of the world should be permitted to define the limits of Nigerian possibility.

Happy Independence Day, Nigeria.

Sixty-six years and counting. May the generosity I remember from that first celebration become an ordinary feature of national life: enough to nourish our children, enough to sustain their hopes, and enough opportunity for them to build lives larger than the difficulties we have known.

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Philip Obazee retired as a managing director and head of derivatives from Macquarie Asset Management – a global asset management company with office in Philadelphia, PA, USA, and currently, he is the founder and chief executive officer of Polymetrics Americas Research.