At 62, Nigeria is the world’s 31st largest economy and its seventh most populous country. It has moved from $93 per capita in 1960 to $2,085 in 2021, with a population increase from 45.14 million people in 1960 to 211.40 million in 2021, indicating a growth of 368%. The measure of economic inequality, which shows greater equality if the number is lower, reflects that the Nigerian gini co-efficient at 1970 was 59.8 and in 2022 it is 35.1, almost the same as that of the United Kingdom. More telling, life expectancy in 1960 was 37 years and in 2022 it is 55 years (the highest ever).
Nigeria is not a failed state or a failed experiment by any measure. It is a steadily evolving and emergent country whose inevitable challenges are often the pathway to greatness, if resolved with intention, persistence and resilience. A very unusual country even at 62, which is quite young. A country where there is no hegemonic ethnic nationality as a dominant force, this is the place of nearly 400 different ethnicities and well over 500 languages.
A country which at 62 years was analysed by Stears Business in 2022 as being second in the global ranking for top performing entertainment and the media consumer market in the music Industry. In 2022 alone it stands atop the world in film industry output, with 1,094 movies already produced. Why, today, 62 years after Independence, does one of the main presidential candidates build his platform with some success on the notion of Nigeria as a failed state or state failure? Why do the elite and the media insist that the nation is on the brink of collapse? This cry and call is amplified in the Western media through CNN, sometimes BBC and even now Al Jazeera. Why is it that all the other positive things do not matter?
There is the Nigeria of insecurity. For a country which, asides a few military coups and one civil war, it has had very little mass conflict to deal with, it now seems that violence has become privatised on a mass scale. War lords, whether terrorists or even criminals, seem to currently have the effrontery to take on the state, with the Nigerian Police especially as the targets of humiliating attacks. The Nigerian, especially in the rural areas where the formal presence of the state is sparse, is targeted for kidnapping, torture, rape and murder. However, are the realities as bad or close to what is publicly highlighted?
If there are critical problems at 62, the worst is the role of the Nigerian woman and girl… The average Nigerian woman has five children and inevitably carries the burden of growing the next generation disproportionately, but is rarely represented in top political offices, rewarded on the farm where she works or is free from rape or harassment in the pursuit of her life. If there is anything that blocks the greatness of Nigeria, it is simply this.
With the average age of the Nigerian at 18, is this not even a signal of the critical pathway to worse or to greatness? There is some reassurance in the 2021 Global Terrorism Index, with a 70% reduction in deaths from terror from the peak in 2014, when there was a bombing spree across the country. Furthermore, the same data reports that the economic impact of terrorism has declined by 65% and casualties related to terror have dropped by 50% between 2020 and 2021. This was before the more recent military onslaught against bandits and terrorists in 2022. These do not mean individual incidents are insignificant, but perhaps if the inevitable but totally unacceptable events were properly put in context, the fear of ‘insecurity’ in the country would be more rational and risks would be better understood.