The Ultimate Curse at 65 Years of Independence
At just four years old, I had my first painful encounter with the harsh realities of Nigeria. Though my early childhood was filled with warmth and family visits, a self-proclaimed prophetess influenced my mother to leave home and give birth in the village to avoid spiritual threats. I still recall her loving farewell vividly, not knowing it would be the last time I would ever see her alive. Because rural Nigeria lacked healthcare facilities and the nearest hospital was some thirty kilometers away, complications during childbirth proved fatal. My mother died shortly after giving birth
Back in Calabar, the atmosphere around me shifted, and though no one explained, I could sense the heaviness in the air. When we reached the village, the cries of my grandmother and the women confused me some more. The next time I would see my mother was her laying lifeless in a casket. Life quickly turned harsher. My father, overwhelmed, remarried for support, but my stepmother became a source of cruelty that turned our once joyful home into a place of fear. The abuse left lasting scars, and even though we lived in a respectable neighborhood, nobody ever came to our rescue. Before long, my father was gone from the picture entirely, and I was left in the care of my grandmother in the village. The transition was jarring, from private tutors and being driven to school, to farming for survival. Though I found small joys in a nearby stream, village festivals, and a new friend, the abrupt shift was brutal.
Just as I was settling into village life, tragedy struck again. Not long after my grandmother fell gravely ill. My grandfather had once served in the military, stationed in the North and even during the civil war, yet his service left his family with nothing after his death. When grandma needed surgery, the hospital turned her away because they were short seventy thousand naira. Desperate, they rushed her to a church as a cheaper alternative, but time ran out and she did not survive.
With her gone, I was back in the city with an aunt. A civil servant who tried to raise three children on a salary that was often delayed for months due to corruption. School became a luxury. My siblings were given priority while I was told to wait my turn. I tried to find another way, moving from church to church pleading for help with my tuition, but each time I was rejected. The most gut wrenching was my experience at Christ Embassy in Nwangiba. They gathered people to listen, gave me a bottle of coke, and made me feel there was hope. But once the crowd dispersed, they quietly sent me out through the back door with a warning never to return.
Eventually, I gave up fighting and resigned myself to the life I had. I stayed home quietly, finding comfort in the Bible. Despite the church having failed me, it was the only place that gave me a sense of purpose, so I joined the choir and taught Sunday school. Just as I was beginning to adjust, tragedy struck again.
Michael who was my close friend and neighbor fell ill. Because his father could not afford hospital care, he was taken to the church instead, and soon after, he died. Not long later, his elder brother lost his sanity and was also left in the hands of the church. Around the same time, Joy’s father, a serving policeman, died as well due to lack of proper medical care.
One morning after service, a young woman who regularly led the chorus was bitten by a snake on her way home. She was rushed back into the church, and I remember shouting for her to be taken to a hospital. My plea was silenced, and I still recall her cries, saying she was too young and did not want to die. By dawn, she too was gone.
Death from the most basic ailments became the norm. Hospitals were either run down or priced far beyond the reach of ordinary people. For millions of Nigerians, access to proper care was not just difficult, it was deliberately out of reach, and sixty five years later things have only gotten worse. I was still shy of a decade on earth, yet I already knew that what I was witnessing was not the natural order of life. Something was deeply broken, and it had been allowed to fester into normal.
To grow up surrounded by so much needless misery is enough to fracture the human spirit.
Amid all the struggles, I managed to secure a scholarship to study abroad. But even that achievement did not shield me from the failures of Nigeria’s healthcare system. A minor stomach ache took me to a small clinic where I was given pills, yet by nightfall I was in unbearable pain and bleeding heavily. I was rushed to Ave Maria Hospital, where I spent several days and watched the bills climb into the millions.
While studying, another sudden crisis struck and left me stranded again, a feeling that had become all too familiar. By then, I had almost grown used to life collapsing without warning. Still, giving up was never an option. I reached out to every Nigerian body I could think of, pleading for help, pushing, insisting. But in the end, there was only silence.
Despite all life threw at me, Nigeria had so many chances to extend a helping hand, to do something, anything. Yet time after time it failed. Lovina, Michael, Emem, Edidiong, Sylvester Oromoni, Celin Ndudim, Afiba Tandoh, Deborah Samuel, Udeme, and the millions of others whose names we may never know have either been left scarred or lost their lives, diminished and betrayed by the very country that should have protected us.
If I were to die today, I would have no regrets because I have lived. And for every bad hand life dealt me, I was equally dealt a hundred better ones. Yet the weight of what I have witnessed as a Nigerian never leaves me, not for myself, but for the millions back home who may never find the strength to endure, or who are crushed before they even know where to begin.
Auntie Udy’s story haunts me. She suffered from fibroids for more than a decade, but a cult masquerading as a church convinced her it was a child. She believed them until the very end, trusting that God would save her. When her condition finally became critical, she was not rushed to a hospital but taken back to the church. Again, another senseless death that could’ve been avoided.
Except my experience is not unique. It is painfully ordinary. What I lived through is the daily reality of millions of Nigerians, many facing far worse. The dysfunction is no longer an error in the system; it has become the system itself. It runs so deep into the fabric of society that I often feel the damage is now beyond repair.
Last year I arrived at Lagos airport seriously sick and half-blind, and not a single person offered to help. The only woman who spoke to me was only interested in my phone and nearly ran off with it. The driver who came for me cared more about squeezing money out of me than getting me home safely. Even as he boasted of being a father, it never crossed his mind that I could have been someone’s daughter too. Not long after, a taxi driver threatened to kill me over two hundred naira. In the process of searching for my lost car, the police turned my pain into another opportunity for extortion.
In Lekki, behind high walls and fancy gates, I saw the same rot dressed up in marble. I went there to visit Joe, who had a twenty-one-year-old live-in help staying in his BQ. I watched him hurl insults at her over the smallest thing, and it felt like reliving the cruelty of my stepmother all over again. He paid her fifty thousand naira a month to cook, clean, and also work long hours in his retail store, while at the same time wiring his daughter in America two thousand dollars for allowance. His driver, a father of three, earned the same miserable fifty thousand, most of which I imagine likely disappeared just on the daily commute from the mainland to the island.
Nigeria’s rot does not stop at government. It seeps into friendships, families, and the most ordinary interactions. I left my car with a best friend of many years, trusting him to sell it for me. He stole it and disappeared, cutting off every member of my family.
This is the truth about Nigeria and the reality for millions. A land where betrayal, cruelty, oppression, and exploitation are not exceptions but the rule, so normalized that they no longer shock those condemned to live through them.
Nigeria at 65 is the curse of an unholy amalgamation, a land stitched together by invaders without thought or consent. What was forced into being as their experiment has become a generational prison, leaving millions at the mercy of a broken state with no one willing to right the wrong.
Nigeria at 65 is the perfect proof that a multiethnic nation forced together by invaders who knew nothing and cared nothing for the land was doomed from the start. It is a failed project, an abomination that should never have been allowed to happen.
Nigeria at 65 is where civil servants, teachers, policemen and soldiers, the very backbone of the nation, are discarded like waste while shameless illiterate politicians loot the treasury and stash the money abroad.
Nigeria at 65 is proof that dysfunction, when left unchecked, does not disappear, it hardens into culture. When churches take the place of hospitals, when abuse inside homes is ignored by neighbors, when corruption is excused as normal, it is no longer a mistake, it becomes the way of life.
Nigeria at 65 is where the nefarious activities of TB Joshua and his likes are allowed to fester unchecked. The hundreds of people who lost their lives in Fatai’s building collapse have received no justice to this day and probably never will. Despite all the truth that has come out, that shrine which should have been reduced to ashes still stands, continuing to hold hundreds of thousands of souls captive.
Nigeria at 65 is where the church business rivals oil in profitability. Charlatans in cassocks and fraudsters in pulpits parade themselves as men and women of God, bleeding the desperate while living in obscene wealth. In the South, churches rise on every street corner like weeds, yet corruption, crime, and evil only multiply.
Nigeria at 65 is where so-called churches take donations from the poor to build schools the same poor can never afford to send their children to. It is where a “man of God” pours fortunes into a 100,000-seat auditorium while the city around him drowns in poverty. It is where exploitation hides behind the pulpit, and the suffering of millions is ignored, while charlatans, some of the biggest conmen and women of all time, have convinced the desperate for years that they are of God.
Nigeria at 65 is where a governor steals the money meant for the survival and progress of millions, only to turn around and use that same stolen wealth to play demigod. Year after year, hundreds of people line up at his gates to beg for crumbs, while he soars on the praise of his supposed generosity. And in the end, that same vulture rises to the highest office in the land, becoming the number one citizen of the country.
Nigeria at 65 is a place where classism and cruelty sit side by side, where the powerful feed off the powerless, and dignity is measured not by merit but by money. There, oppression is not only practiced but celebrated, and inequality has grown so deep it feels like the natural order of things.
Nigeria at 65 is a place where women still lose their lives in childbirth, a tragedy that should have ended generations ago. In a world where safe delivery is basic in most countries, there it remains a death sentence for thousands every year. It is a place where seventy thousand naira can decide whether a grandmother lives or dies, and where policemen and soldiers are buried without honor, forgotten by the very nation they served.
Nigeria at 65 is where young people, already struggling to survive the inhumane conditions of the country, are kidnapped, robbed, and maimed week after week while the so-called authorities remain mute. Nothing is done, and nothing will probably ever be done, because it does not affect the one percent.
Nigeria at 65 is where, despite knowing how dangerous life can be in the Arab world for us, our young girls still go there to work as maids because home offers them nothing. They leave knowing they may have their passports seized, be locked in houses, beaten, or worked to exhaustion. Despite the uncertainty that awaits them there, they still go, because that slim chance of survival abroad feels less cruel than the inhumane reality at home.
Nigeria at 65 is where Keniye Koroye can speak about the disadvantages he and millions of us face just for being Nigerian, and the comment section is filled with men who should have been pioneers of change but instead fled like cowards to secure foreign citizenship. They insist it is not so bad because their own lives turned out different. These are the same cowards eager to parade empty patriotism to a failed system while raising their children to be anything but Nigerian. They scream rights this and rights that in their host countries, yet stay silent while their brothers and sisters die in poverty and oppression back home. In the same breath, they brag about their children being foreign this and foreign that, blind to the hypocrisy of claiming love for Nigeria while grooming their children to disown her. Except give anyone your names and they can trace exactly what village you come from, because no foreign passport in the world can ever wash off where you come from or erase your roots.
Nigeria at 65 is like an active enemy in the life of the average Nigerian, and if you believe in reincarnation, then think you are paying the ultimate price for whatever sins you committed in your past life.
Nigeria at 65 is like starting life 100 to 0 down before you even touch the ball. It is quite literally the worst thing that could happen to a human, and I would never wish it on my worst enemy.
So, today, I do not celebrate Nigeria at sixty-five. I mourn what it could have been, and rage at what it has become.
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