Nigeria at 66 · A letter
A letter to a country I love!
Dear Nigeria,
You are 66 today, and before I celebrate you, I owe a confession.
For most of my life I treated obligation as punishment, because that is what you taught me. In school, cleaning was not citizenship. It was sentencing. Come late, cut the grass. Do wrong, pack the dirt. The lesson under the lesson was clear: caring for a shared space is what happens to people who did something wrong.
And it worked on me. Long into adulthood I would pass waste and refuse to pick it up, and the reflex underneath was a question: who is punishing me? I had to catch that thought and unlearn it deliberately, as an adult, in my own country.
Psychology says this is exactly how it goes: use a task to punish and the task itself becomes the pain, and coercion corrodes the will to act freely. UNICEF's surveys have found that around 85 percent of Nigerian children experience violent discipline. We drilled a generation in shame and called it discipline. Japanese children clean their own schools every day, as curriculum and as honour, and Japan's streets show what those children still believe at forty. Aristotle said we become what we repeatedly do. Ubuntu answers better: I am because we are. Obligation was never a sentence. It is belonging.
I see the same wound in my own industry. Our creative industry is this country's new oil: the one resource all thirty-six states hold, that never runs dry, that the world already buys at full price. And we treat its maintenance the way school taught us to. The glamour is celebrated; the tending is avoided. Contracts unread. Rights unregistered. Royalties uncollected. Training treated as the consolation prize of the unfamous. That is oil without a refinery, and the difference between a gift and an economy is maintenance.
So here is my message to you at 66. Patriotism is not a feeling; it is maintenance. Nobody fixes a country alone, and that was never the assignment. My corner is the creative industry: more than 1,800 people trained since 2020, a thousand professionals in training for 2027, institutions built to outlast my mood, with everyone determined enough to stay at the work. You have a corner too. Fix the one you can reach, with the people within your reach, for as long as it takes, and teach the children that the work is an honour and not a penalty.
The country is the sum of the corners. Nigeria is not a random place. Nigeria is its people. Nigeria is you and me!
Happy Independence Day, to a country I love. Now, back to work.