By Lasisi Olagunju
A trending video shows Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, interrogating his national football team after their recent loss to Nigeria. His question was simple but unsettling: Why did you all go to attack and leave the goalkeeper to do your work? Then came the clincher: In the army, we don’t do that.
This is far more than a lesson in football; it is a theory of state failure. We run our country the same way Uganda’s team played that match. Museveni spoke of AOR (Area of Responsibility). A Nigerian (politician) would likely ask: What is that? We do not have AOR in the management of our national affairs in Nigeria. Everyone rushes forward to score, to be seen, to take credit. No one stays back to defend the system from predatory goal-poachers. We chase goals and gold—and in the process, we concede goals. The result is a nation that is structurally broken and perpetually defeated.
We wasted the whole of 2025 chasing what may be farfetched – the goals and gold of 2027. The year in-between the two is here now with the certainty that it will be a year of baleful politics, of deepening crises and ‘wars’ across the divides.
The New Year invites reflection. Politicians defect, chasing elite deals; with disdain and contempt, they spurn public good; the people look on, envying the very hands that bruise them. Thirty-five days before his death, Chief Obafemi Awolowo took a deep look at the bedridden Nigeria, and said the “fault is in our attitudes and ways of life”; he then declared that “our stars have been dimmed by incompetent rulers.” Today, those stars no longer merely flicker; the dimming have burnt out. Why does the past always appear kinder than the present? The lodestars have been dimmed.
Was it Shakespeare who suggested that the golden age lies before us, not behind us? Whoever said it may well have been right, for his time. The harder question is whether that view holds true for us.
I start with this long note from a classmate:
“I cannot now clearly say whether it was 1972 or 1973. Dates blur with age, but some memories refuse to fade. What I know with certainty is that I had not yet started school. We lived then on Hogan Bassey Crescent, just behind the National Stadium in Lagos—a neighbourhood of the displaced Lagosians uprooted in the late sixties to make way for the Eko Bridge. We were tenants in one of the flats, ordinary people in an ordinary struggle.
“One afternoon, I wandered away from home with a neighbour who was only two days younger than I was. My mother, a seamstress, was indoors stitching dresses, unaware that two little girls had slipped beyond the gate. About 800 metres from home, we crossed a road the way children do—without caution, without calculation. There was no looking right, left, and right again. There was only play, and then, impact.
I remember it was a Volkswagen. The next clear memory is of regaining consciousness in a hospital bed, my body swaddled in bandages. My friend escaped with minor injuries. I did not. My left thigh was fractured. Both legs were suspended in the air for what felt like an eternity; how long, I could not tell. Childhood has no calendar for pain.
“That period offered experiences that today’s Nigerian child would dismiss as fiction. My family, at the time, was navigating financial turbulence. We shared a two-bedroom flat with another family. My father was no one of consequence, just a struggling Nigerian, protective of his own, with little beyond that instinct. I say this only to establish context: there was no privilege here, no influence to deploy.
“Before my mother even knew that disaster had struck, a passing military vehicle stopped, rescued us, and took us to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Idi-Araba. By the time our families arrived (after searching hospitals blindly) we had been stabilised. No one asked for money. No one asked for a guarantor. No one asked where our parents were. Two little girls arrived without names or contacts, and were properly treated – and saved.
“My mother stepped in where the nurses stopped. When I was eventually discharged, my legs were free but my body was not. I remained bedridden and had to return to the hospital every two days for follow-up checks. My father had no car. Transporting a child with a healing thigh bone every other day would have been an ordeal. So LUTH sent an ambulance.
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“Every other day, for weeks, an ambulance came to our house, took my mother and me to the hospital, and brought us back. Recently, I asked my mother if she paid for this service. She could not remember paying a kobo for the treatment, or for the ambulance runs.
“When I tell my children this story, they argue with me. They insist it could not have happened in this same country. Sometimes, even I wonder if it was a dream.
“As I write this, another memory returns: me, a small child, singing “ambulance mi ti ń bọ” (my ambulance is on the way) while the little feet of my friends gathered by my bed every morning after breakfast, dancing and clapping at the arrival of my ambulance.
“What changed?
“Who changed it?
“How did a system once guided by duty fracture beyond repair?
“The Anthony Joshua accident has been on my mind. Sometimes, class pales before a system that no longer works.
God bless Nigeria, my country.”
The above happened to one of my university classmates. Nigeria took care of her in her childhood and in her youth, she today works with a multi-national agency. The lady shared the experience with me as we discussed the state of the nation on New Year’s Day.
Memories, sometimes, are cherished; nostalgia is beautiful. Thoroughly disillusioned, today we say the best days are behind us. The very optimistic among us say the best is waiting somewhere ahead. Whatever it is, “old is gold”, we celebrate timeless moments and the lessons distilled from experience.
There is another story about another person, this time, the narrator is a male:
Schooling in another town, the teenager always looked forward to his weekends when he would reunite with his parents. This Friday, he got home from school and met the family house shut.
He was shocked. It was the first time he would meet the front door locked and the whole house desolate.
What happened? Neighbours came around and informed the teenager that his mother had been ill and taken to Osogbo five days earlier.
He burst into tears. Neighbours took him in for the night. The following day, he was by his mother’s bedside at the Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Hospital (Jaleyemi), Osogbo.
For the next three months or so, the sick was there receiving the best attention anyone could get. Then, one day, she was told she was now okay and should prepare to go home the following day.
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Her husband and other relations were worried. Since she was brought into the hospital, the bills had piled up. How much? There was no information. Then the shock: She wasn’t going to pay a dime; government had taken care of it. Health is now free, courtesy of the new government – the UPN government of Bola Ige.
The patient in the above story was my mother; my own mother. It was in 1980, forty-five years ago. I am the narrator.
Now, this: the hospital was not a government hospital; it was (still is) a Catholic hospital, private. How it was done and made free for my mother, I am still trying to find out. I am not sure any of my children would believe this story if I told them. But the experience happened; it was real, I am a living witness to it.
That same era was a time when education was free, truly free. I got admitted into what was known as Secondary Modern School in September 1978. I paid N18 as school fees. The following September, I paid the same amount. The following month, October, 1979, we got a refund of the fees. The school authorities told us “education is now free” courtesy of the new government of Awolowo’s party. Our teachers did not steal and eat the refund; we (I) did not steal it too. I took it home. I saw something like satisfaction in my father’s eyes when I gave him the money; something like “my vote for Awolowo’s party (Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN) was worth it.”
Growing up, I saw government in close proximity with the people. Take this letter from my governor to every secondary school child in the old Oyo State who was set for Form Two in 1981:
14 July, 1981.
My dear child,
You have just completed the first year of your secondary school education; I hope you had a very useful school year and laid a good foundation for your career.
Shortly before you left your primary school last year, many people thought it was not possible to admit you and the over 120,000 of your colleagues into secondary schools in one year. Because of the commitment of our government and our party, the Unity Party of Nigeria, to providing all of you with free secondary education, we believed it was possible.
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We made it possible because we also believe that every child, like yourself, is entitled to be provided with education by the state. We believe, too, that we must not let any of you become the servant of the opponents of this programme; hence we did all we could to make it possible. Everyone has now seen that it has been made possible.
Let me recall some of what I told you on September 26, last year, your first day in Grammar School: “Today, some 100,000 of you, boys and girls, in all parts of Oyo State, in cities, towns and villages from poor homes, from rich homes, from not-so-rich homes, are entering secondary school for the first time. I want you to realise that there are millions of Nigerian children in other parts of the country who do not have this opportunity as you have.”
I hope you make use of the great opportunity. I trust that you took care of the books you were given at school. I hope you shall be of great help to your parents during the holidays. As a member of the Young Pioneers Movement, you must and shall be good example to others and to your junior brothers and sisters who will join you in September this year.
Have a nice holiday, enjoy yourself and be good.
I am, Your Uncle ‘Bola.
That was 44 years ago. Every secondary school student going into class two got a copy of the letter signed by the governor, Uncle Bola Ige.
My first day at the University of Ife, I was assigned a bed space at Angola Hall. At the Porters’ Lodge, every Jambite got a note on the dos, don’ts and the services offered in the facility. In that note was this line: “electricity is constant; the taps are running…”
The past was golden. We look back not because yesterday was perfect, but, as someone said,it is because it helps us measure how far we have come, and sometimes, how far we have drifted.
Andrew S. Cairncross in his ‘Shakespeare and the Golden Age’ (1970)
draws a line between two opposite sides of the same coin: the golden age and the age of gold. The first was Eden, Paradise, the past with its fair and fairness. The second is “the age where money was the supreme or the only value…”
The past of today was definitely golden; today is the age of gold, money is the supreme and the only value.
In ‘Timon of Athens’ Shakespeare says where gold is allowed to rule, it never hestates to make “Black white, foul fair, wrong right,
Base noble, old young, coward valiant…
knit and break religions, bless the accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored,
place thieves
And give them title…”
The playwright wrote about today’s Nigeria.
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We lost the golden age of the First Republic and the silver of the Second. We’ve made a jungle of what is supposed to be our Garden of Eden. Why has the good we once knew eluded us? In Chief Awolowo’s time, it was bad leadership that dimmed the stars; today, it is no longer leadership; it is not followership; it lies deeper than both. We are a patch-patch nation, fractured by prolonged structural fissures, with the grim potential for simmering tensions to erupt. A country called Somalia shows the end point of unrestrained central failure. What we today call insecurity and an epidemic of poverty frighteningly place Nigeria at the Somalia crossroads.
Why is it difficult for us to accept that reforming federalism can give the right leadership, strengthen unity and peace, and engender prosperity while its neglect will open doors to forces that pull apart the parts? And centrifugal pressures don’t abate until they are done. In its abject failure as a state, Somalia still has a Somaliland that is almost out of its map. Politicians in this country think they have conquered the people and that all we deserve are the coming elections and the elections after the next. In the Yoruba play, Saworoide, there is this repetition that builds tension and inevitability: “Ko i ye won; y’o ye won l’ola” (They do not understand now; they will understand tomorrow).
In droves, politicians defect from the people to the palace’s comfort; they circle power like carrion-eating birds. The people no longer matter. Professor Toyin Falola, in an interview I did for him at the weekend, spoke about defections, democracy and decay. I flow with him. A ‘democratic’ system that conquers its people, that criminally gives no alternative, is rotted; it is an ant-infested wood. Ant-infested woods end by fire. Who will tell our husbands that where there is internal decay, foreign intrusion comes easily. Because Venezuela’s promise went rancid and lost its savour, as the Yoruba would say, it became easy for Donald Trump to pour sand into the salt of its sovereignty on Saturday. For Nigeria, the vultures are hovering.
May the new year redeem our country.
