THEY may come from all works of life, including teachers and educators, sportsmen, broadcasters, scholars, artists, administrators, civil and public servants, religious leaders, traditional rulers and more.

We had many such people fifty years and for many decades thereafter. Today, there appears to be rather few. Granted this paucity possibly derives in part from the public’s disillusionment particularly with the legacy of our political leaders and their cohorts.

There is no doubt that individuals have contemporary models and heroes from their more private and personal exposure and experience from whom they derive inspiration.

But all societies need public heroes, and today as we continue to observe our country’s Golden Jubilee, the pool of models and heroes, individuals with genuine accomplishments and exemplary astuteness, uprightness and unquestioned excellence, sadly appears rather small.

Overall, the extended unwholesome social, economic and political experience of the last decade or so by Nigerians may have left traces of incipient psychological and emotional deficits that will need to be quickly indentified, diagnosed and addressed. These would include depression from dissatisfaction.

The irony of Nigeria’s checkered history over the last fifty years is that we got it right at the very beginning. Our founding fathers and the Nigerian experts and civil servants who diligently served them put together strategies and policies that set Nigeria on a coherent and most promising path to rapid and durable strategic development. What went wrong is what we need to identify, define, diagnose and resolve.

In part, somehow, somewhere, outside individuals, enterprises and institutions came between us and our subsequent political leadership. Somehow insecure in themselves and less willing to expose this anxiety to their fellow citizens (partially because of the need to maintain authority by hiding weaknesses), a good number of those who came to govern Nigeria preferred to go seek or accept the advise and services of outsiders many of whom knew little or nothing about Nigeria’s dream, attributes, challenges and their solutions, and who simply created a gulf between Nigeria’s best minds and our political leadership.

This in itself helped to spread and internationalize the corruption. Today, every Tom, Dick and Harry comes to Nigeria to offer just about every bit of foolishness for pay. Unfortunately, they seem to easily find a public official or two, or their surrogates, who are more than eager to sponsor and pay for them.

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s world-class experts, those in whom the country and/or their families and communities invested so much so that they would acquire the tools with which to build Nigeria, have been sidelined, and their voices muffled, if not silenced.

The result of all of this is that Nigeria has lost the critical value of self-development, that intervention of passion and tirelessness by people who commit themselves to national development because they hope to leave behind a legacy that their family, children and successors that see and take deep pride in. Under the present dispensation, there will be very little that Nigerians will be able to show their children and grandchildren that they built in or for Nigeria.

Ironically, this is the direct opposite of the strategy and approach fifty years ago when our founding fathers built their plans for Nigeria primarily on the knowledge and promise of the genius of Nigeria’s best. This approach also informed the strategic selfdevelopment agenda that was created by Nigeria under the Indigenous Business Decree which  attracted so many Nigerians back home to join the task of building out the great Nigerian Dream.

When people have to struggle to contribute to the building of their own nation while others barely comparable to them prevail, something is wrong, seriously wrong.

But for these strategic flaws that have had the cumulative effect of setting us back over the last couple of decades, Nigeria could and would have become one of the fast-growing modern socio-economies in the world, consistent with her early dream. This is what might have been.

Mr. Okpaku Sr. is President, Telecom Africa Inter. Corp., New York, USA.