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At independence, a country stood at the shoreline with a chest of rare gifts: oil buried in mud and mangrove, tin and columbite sleeping in highland rock, a young population roaring with promise, and a map threaded with rivers broad enough to carry commerce and culture from hinterland to coast. The anthem promised “noble heights attained.” The leaders promised even more. Then they built a scaffold of greed and called it government.
First came the uniformed years, when the gun learned the grammar of decree. Budgets were drafted like war communiqués, and national planning was a rumor that never survived the parade ground. Oil money poured in, too heavy to be carried by wisdom, too sweet to be moderated by restraint. We paved our future with petrodollars and left the schools unroofed. We imported everything rice, needles, ideas and exported the one thing we should have refined: crude, in every sense of the word.
Democracy arrived wearing borrowed lace. The ballots were counted like they were favors, and the courts were asked to launder the stains. The new class studied the old class and learned the lesson perfectly: build a mansion, steal a ministry, sermonize about sacrifice from a foreign hospital bed. Federalism, a fine word, shrank into a feeding bottle. States waited for their monthly ration from the center; local governments waited for crumbs from the states. Power electric and political became a generator humming in a politician’s backyard while the street out front stayed dark.
They nationalized failure and privatized hope. Water retreated into the ground, where households drilled for it one borehole at a time. The lights blinked like a dying firefly, and we memorialized outages with the drone of generators. Hospitals practiced triage on budgets as much as on bodies. Teachers marked attendance in classrooms with broken windows while their brightest students learned to conjugate escape: I will leave, you will leave, we will leave.
They discovered a way to tax breath and leave public goods untended. A thousand silent levies crept into every transfer, withdrawal, import, stamp, and signature, while roads buckled and bridges rusted as if time itself had been abandoned. The currency shed its skin every season, and salaries became fiction told at month’s end. The market did not merely rise; it mocked. A bag of rice became a verdict; a bottle of cooking gas, a negotiation with hunger.
Security dissolved like salt in rain. Banditry came down from the hills and up from the headlines, stalking highways and homesteads with equal audacity. The village square lost its evening laughter; the city lost its right to sleep. We built gated neighborhoods that felt like besieged embassies, then pretended we had achieved development because the walls were high and the dogs loud.
Underneath it all, corruption grew roots so deep they sucked water from tomorrow. Institutions were converted into wardrobes things to hang personal ambitions in, to change costumes between sham trials and loud appropriations. Elections, the sacred ritual of consent, were turned into theatre where the audience paid for tickets and never saw the ending they chose. When the bills arrived, the political class toasted austerity with imported wine, and the people were instructed to tighten belts they could no longer afford.
And so a quiet procession began at airports before dawn. Not just the poor, not just the desperate engineers, nurses, coders, teachers, artisans with hands that could build nations all queued with folders of documents, test scores, and X-rays of their hopes. They left through study visas, work permits, asylum corridors, and marriage lines; left with songs and swallowed tears; left promising to return when the country grew up. They did not flee adventure they fled arithmetic: the math of rent versus wage, of medicine versus mortality, of talent versus opportunity. They became economic refugees, ambassadors of a squandered inheritance, wiring back remittances like ransom to families still held hostage by policy.
What failed was not fate. It was stewardship decade after decade of men who mistook office for ownership, who treated the commons as a carcass to be carved, who sang unity while governing by division, who could recite manifestos but could not maintain a clinic, who shook hands with tomorrow and picked its pocket. They curated a culture where excellence was a nuisance and accountability an insult. They turned the civil service into a maze where time went to die, and made heroism out of survival.
Yet the country, stubborn as harmattan, refuses to disappear. In markets at first light, traders arrange possibility beside pepper and yam. In labs stitched together with secondhand parts, young inventors solder futures. In classrooms where the paint peels, a teacher draws a clean circle on a dirty board and places the world inside it. The people continue to do what nations ask of leaders: build, mend, imagine, endure.
But endurance is not a policy, and hope is not an infrastructure plan. A state is measured by the distance between the taxes it collects and the lives it dignifies. By that measure, our rulers have failed methodically, historically, and with remarkable consistency turning a land charged with gifts into a departure lounge. Until leadership becomes service instead of appetite; until institutions are stone, not slogans; until the budget first asks what the child and the clinic need; until the ballot is a mirror and not a mask the runways will stay crowded before sunrise, and the nation will keep mistaking survival for success.
They inherited a dream. They spent it. Now the people pay the interest in foreign airports, one boarding pass at a time.
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