It’s a new day, a new week (well, almost!), a new month, and above all, a New Year! It’s the year 2025. The year is just hours old, so, it is not out of place for me to wish you a very Happy New Year!
Later this year, the Bola Ahmed Tinubu government will be two years in office, just as the governments at the state level that were sworn in the same day on 29 May 2023. Still this year, the fourth republic (I belong to the school of thought which argues that this is our third since there was no change in government at the highest level in the aborted third republic) will be twenty six-years old.
Do not ask me what we have achieved in twenty-six years as a nation because evidences are everywhere even for the blind to see. Individual politicians are now being accused of stealing trillions of Naira. Growing up in the second republic of the Barkin Zuwos, the Joseph Wayas, the Adisa Akinloyes and the Umaru Dikkos, we used to hear that politicians stole hundreds of thousands of Naira or that they pocketed 10 percent of contract values. In the early years of this third (no, fourth) republic, we started stealing millions of Naira, and quickly ramped up to billions. Now, we are in the trillions region because, just as other things in the market, we must benchmark our thievery with the United States’ dollar. This is the catch: if a governor stole N100 billion in 2007, his counterpart who finished his tenure in 2023 would have to use a calculator to figure out how many trillions that would be in today’s value.
Don’t think I am making it up. In the dying days of last year, a former governor and vice presidential candidate was being investigated for allegedly pocketing N1.3 trillion of the state funds (please, note the two words investigated and allegedly!). The other day the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) claimed it seized an entire estate of over 700 housing units allegedly (that word!) belonging to one man under investigation for financial crimes. Though the Commission refused to name the person, someone volunteered to guess one (allegedly) said to be connected to the estate the day I landed in Abuja (which was a day or two after the EFCC announcement).
In climes where sane people live, news of such magnitude of crime could cause earthquakes. But here, because we’re Nigerians living in Nigeria, that news did not even quake an ant. Conversely, you could almost certainly hear some people say things like: how did the guy do it; why did he invest such amount of money in Nigeria; why did he still stay back in Nigeria; with such money, you and your generations are made for life!
If you think we have not achieved much in 26 years, be reminded that we taught the world new ways of corruption. The world bank has confirmed that 50 percent of us live in poverty; meaning that we remain the nation with the highest population of poor people. Since we overtook India (which is now the most populous nation on earth) some five or so years ago, we have done nothing to get out of that woeful position. We are even entrenching poverty and hunger. Last December, no matter how you want to slice it, we even killed some of our compatriots who queued for food in Abuja, Oyo and Anambra States. We have not been able to generate one extra megawatt of electricity since 1999 despite the tens of billions of dollars poured into that sector. Nigeria, the sixth most populous nation on earth, is not on the map of 100 energy producing nations.
Common thing as getting people to serve us through elections, we are unable to conduct. All you hear, when your mandate has been brazenly stolen , is GO TO COURT! Even Ghana is teaching us how to conduct elections; but because we are very poor students when it comes to learning good things, we have rejected both the lesson and the teacher! Talking about courts in Nigeria, or more broadly speaking the judicial system, magic has replaced justice. The former temple of justice has become the den of abracadabra. That sector is now always very hyper during periods of general elections because no less than 3,000 pre and post election cases would end up in court, and you know what that translates into.
We can hide behind a leaf and pretend that all is well, or that what we are facing in Nigeria is universal, as many politicians and religious people like to say. It is not entirely true. Many things we relish in Nigeria are nearly abominations elsewhere. A few statistics can help.
1. Highest GDP per capita in Africa goes to Seychelles with $21,875 (which is almost twice global average of $13,840) while Nigeria’s is $1,110 earning us a comfortable 33rd place in Africa!
2. Nigeria’s busiest airport is the eighth busiest in Africa even though we’re the most populous country and biggest economy!
3. Ninth most corrupt country in Africa (full disclosure: we’re getting better because we were previously the world’s 150th corrupt-free, but now 145th).
4. At 3.8%, Nigeria has the highest population growth rate in Africa
5. 2023 average life expectancy in Africa was 64.11 years. Nigeria’s was 55.75 years while Algeria’s was 77.3 years (matching United States’).
6. While 99 percent of Egyptians have access to portable water, just over half of Nigerians do.
If you have observed, I limited these comparisons to Africa. I deliberately avoided global statistics where we are nowhere, and concentrated on Africa to illustrate the point that even within the continent where we claim to be the giant, we had since been dusted. We can continue to fool ourselves with self-adulation but it will not change the fact that many countries have left us behind.
But all hope is not lost which is why the new year 2025 is important. The year presents an opportunity for us to turn a new leaf; a reason to hope again; to chart a new direction, to dream again and to do things differently. It is not foreign direct investment that will change Nigeria; it’s not alliances with foreign countries that will change our behaviour, it’s not the efforts of a few private individuals who will change the course of history for our country. None of this will cut it; at best, they will benefit a few hundreds or thousands of individuals, and the status quo will remain.
What we need is the collective will of many of us from all walks of life to build a nation of our dreams. The current crop of politicians have told us they cannot and will not do it for us. We have got to dream again and act: men and women; young and old people, the educated and the not so educated, the poor and the rich, northerners and southerners, people of diverse ethnic and faith backgrounds and so on and so forth. Nigeria is in dire need of nation builders. If we don’t put our hands on the plow, generations unborn may not even have a chance or a country to do it.
I hope we know that by 2050 our country is projected to be the third most populous nation on earth, overtaking the United States of America in population size. If we don’t get a few things in place before then, the crises we face today will be a child’s play. There will be no enough land to tuck in a population of over 400 million people.
One major, but often overlooked, problem we can agree to deal with in 2025 is indiscipline! Permit me to say it: a typical Nigerian lacks discipline; and this is what we bring in to our public spaces. Let’s resolve to tone down our level of indiscipline in 2025!
Nigerians, Happy New Year!
Esiere is a former journalist!
©️2025
