Nigeria’s Arrested Development

It would not be an overstatement to argue that, 60 years after gaining independence from Britain, Nigeria has largely struggled to realize its potential. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s 2019 Human Development Index report released shows Nigeria on the low human development range of the human development index scale, ranking 20th when measured against other African countries.

While many are of the opinion that Nigeria started out on the right path politically and somehow derailed, there is a divergent school of thought suggesting that Nigeria always lacked progressive leadership from the get-go. Renowned humanitarian and political commentator, Archbishop Matthew Kukah, has long argued that Nigeria’s arrested development could largely be put down to a lack of visionary leadership, owing to a succession of ‘accidental presidents’ unprepared for the task ahead of them. According to Archbishop Kukah:

The reasons are many but they are not unrelated to the accidental processes by which all our former heads of state and presidents have come to power. The average newcomer to the presidency of Nigeria comes totally unprepared, with no knowledge of the environment itself, no experience in public life, no knowledge of the bureaucracy or those who run the system, no knowledge of politics and power derived from some years of loyal pupilage.

This assertion requires a critical cross-examination of Nigerian political history, with emphasis on the circumstances leading to the emergence of each one of Nigeria’s heads of government in the first 30 years post-independence.