The Miracle We Refuse to See: Nigeria’s Improbable Peace and the Leadership It Still Awaits

The Miracle We Refuse to See: Nigeria’s Improbable Peace and the Leadership It Still Awaits

The Miracle We Refuse to See: Nigeria’s Improbable Peace and the Leadership It Still Awaits

Nigeria was not born. It was assembled. In 1914, an ambitious British colonial administrator, Lord Frederick Lugard, amalgamated the Northern and Southern Protectorates into a single territory — a decision made for administrative convenience and imperial economy, not for the peoples who lived there. His consort, Flora Shaw, gave the contraption its name. No referendum was held. No chief, emir, oba, or amanyanabo was consulted on whether the Sokoto Caliphate, the Benin Kingdom, the Kalabari and Ijaw city-states of the Niger Delta, the Igbo republics of the east, and the Yoruba kingdoms of the west wished to share a flag, a currency, and a destiny.

Today, that assembled country holds approximately 242 million people — the most populous nation in Africa and the sixth most populous on Earth — speaking more than 500 distinct languages across at least 250 ethnic groups, with some counts placing the number of ethnic nationalities above 370. By any measure, Nigeria is one of the most culturally complex political experiments ever attempted.

And here is the point my fellow Nigerians must absorb, because we have been taught to see only our failures: in more than a century of forced cohabitation, this improbable country has suffered exactly one existential rupture — the civil war of 1967 to 1970. One. Everything else — seven coups d’état, bandîtry, insûrgency, kdnæpping, the daily grind of misgovernance — is serious, painful, and unacceptable. But it is not national dissolution. Measured against the historical record of the very empire that created us, it is, frankly, a miracle of restraint.

The Colonizer’s Own Report Card

Consider Britain’s path to its celebrated “peaceful democracy.”

The Hundred Years’ War against France consumed English blood and treasure from 1337 to 1453 — 116 years of dynastic slaughter. Barely two years after it ended, England turned its swords inward: the Wars of the Roses, three decades of aristocratic butchery between the houses of Lancaster and York, ending only in 1487. Two centuries later came the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651, in which Englishmen killed Englishmen in numbers that, proportionally, exceeded Britain’s losses in the First World War — and a king, Charles I, was beheaded by his own parliament.

Then the twentieth century: two world wars that Britain did not merely endure but helped ignite through the very imperial rivalries that had carved up Africa at the Berlin Conference. Tens of millions dead across two generations.

And the viœlence did not end in 1945.The Irish Republican Army was bœmbing and shöõting its way toward the negotiating table. The Troubles claimed some 3,500 lives over three decades. Checking beneath one’s car for a bomb was a routine precaution in certain circles — a precaution that acquired grim urgency after October 1984, when the IRA planted a long-delay time bomb in the Grand Hotel in Brighton in an attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet. Five people died. Thatcher survived by minutes and a few metres. Peace in Northern Ireland arrived only with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 — after eight centuries of Anglo-Irish bloodshed.

This is the nation that assembled Nigeria and now lectures it on stability.

The Company We Are Compared To

Nor does Nigeria suffer by comparison with its contemporaries. Israel, a country of fewer than 10 million people, has fought major wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, and continuously since 2023 — it has scarcely known a decade without armed conflict. Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, emerged only recently from the Tigray war, one of the deadliest conflicts of the twenty-first century, with mortality estimates reaching into the hundreds of thousands. Sudan has split in two and is now devouring itself. Yugoslavia — a European federation with a fraction of Nigeria’s diversity — shattered into seven countries amid genocide. The Soviet Union dissolved. Czechoslovakia divorced.

Nigeria — with more languages than all of Europe combined — is still here. Still one country. Still holding elections, however flawed. Still fielding one national football team that makes 242 million hearts beat as one. The world’s second-largest presidential democracy after the United States has been written off in every decade since 1960, and in every decade it has refused to die.

That endurance is not an accident. It is the daily, unheralded achievement of ordinary Nigerians — the Hausa trader in Onitsha, the Igbo mechanic in Kano, the Yoruba teacher in Port Harcourt, the Ijaw doctor in Kaduna — who choose coexistence over chaos every single morning.

The Missing Ingredient

So let us be precise about what ails us. Nigeria’s problem is not its people, who have proven themselves among the most resilient, entrepreneurial, and forbearing on Earth. It is not our diversity, which is our wealth. It is not even our artificial borders, which we have made real through shared sacrifice.

Our problem is leadership. Specifically, the capture of the Nigerian state by a criminal class that treats the treasury as personal inheritance and public office as private franchise.

The proof that leadership — not geography, not ethnicity, not colonial history — determines destiny stands on an island in Southeast Asia. In 1965, Singapore was expelled from Malaysia: a swampy port city with no natural resources, no hinterland, a fractious mix of Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities, and a per capita income around $500. Lee Kuan Yew did not have oil. He did not have gas. He did not have 923,000 square kilometres of arable land, tin, columbite, and the mouth of a great river. What he had was incorruptibility, meritocracy, and the political will to jail his friends when they stole. Sixty years later, Singaporeans enjoy one of the highest per capita incomes in the world.

Nigeria has everything Singapore lacked and lacks the one thing Singapore had.

The Blessing and the Assignment

I write this not to excuse our condition but to reframe it. A people persuaded that they are uniquely cursed will accept anything. A people who understand that they have already achieved the hard part — holding an “impossible” country together for over a century with a single civil war on the ledger — will demand the easier part: honest management.

The infrastructure can be rebuilt. The naira can be stabilised. The refineries can run. The power can flow. Rwanda cleaned its streets; Singapore cleaned its government; the United Arab Emirates built a global hub on sand. None of it required a miracle. All of it required leaders who did not steal.

Nigeria’s unity was the miracle. It has already happened. What remains is arithmetic — and the courage, at the ballot box and in the public square, to retire the criminals in power and replace them with the qualified, patriotic leadership that 242 million remarkable people have earned a hundred times over.

The colonizer took a hundred years’ war, a war of roses, a civil war, and two world wars to arrive at peaceful democracy. We took one war and sixty-six years. By the colonizer’s own timetable, we are ahead of schedule.

Now let us act like it.

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