In a heart-breaking piece of writing, Nigerian Dele Momodu shares his hurt and frustration at watching his country dissipate at the 50th anniversary of its independence.
The problem is I love Nigeria too much despite our unending miseries. No nation in Africa should be greater than ours: I began to daydream, as usual. We are blessed with the largest population of black people on earth. We are beautiful and brilliant. We are confident, agile and hardworking. We are smart and intelligent. We are bold and ambitious. We are daring and adventurous. We are fashionable and trendy. We are religious and supposed to be God-fearing. We have been entrusted with everything – gold, iron, bauxite, coal, cocoa, oil, gas, bitumen, cotton, wildlife, groundnuts, most fertile land, awesome coastlines, vegetables and fruits, arts and crafts, brains and wisdom that should make everyone of us prosperous.
But our prodigiously wasteful and insatiably greedy rulers have chosen to throw us down, from the pinnacle of the temple to the bottomless pit of hell.
The scary truth is that there are no easy answers to any of this.