Reflections on 50 years
Blogger Jeremy Weate asked seven Nigerians to respond to an historic picture from Nigeria's independence day.Writing on Nigeria’s 50th Anniversary of Independence
Can Nigeria legitimately still call itself a force to be reckoned with, both in the region and internationally? Can we call ourselves a superpower of Africa? Or have we been sleeping so long that we’ve unknowingly slipped into an ongoing vegetative state? Fifty years is an awfully short time in which to judge a country’s success, but it is a fair distance from which to look at its failures.
Has the Nigeria Project been a disaster? If it has, was it always doomed, and can it still be salvaged? Or is the forecasted doom and gloom an overreaction? Will Nigeria rise from the ashes of upheaval, scarred and cracked, but still with a fighter’s spirit? Is Nigeria, as Father Matthew Kukah described it, similar to a Catholic marriage: “It may not be happy, but it does not break up”?
To mark Nigeria’s five decades, we dusted down an iconic photograph. The image above shows a handover of power – from James Robertson, the last British Governor-General of Nigeria to Tafawa Balewa, the first Prime Minister of Nigeria. We asked eight writers to tell us what feelings the photograph evoked for them...
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Labels: history, Nigeria, political culture
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:27 AM
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