Up and About Nigeria - rejoinder

From my last post, I got a very detailed reply via e-mail from a friend. Waking up to that was such an amazing thing, that I decided to write a follow up post with his comments. 

I say a very big thank you to all of you who follow my blog and come here to read whatever it is I have to write. Please keep the comments coming, they make it all worthwhile :-)

That was a very great piece by Ene and I thought I should lend my thoughts to some points she raised. Yes, Nigeria just reached her centenary year as an entity and quite frankly, many aspects of her nationhood leaves a lot to be desired. However, there are many contributing factors to this and I feel obliged to respond to two main issues: History and the state of historical artefacts. I would not mention much about the economic aspect as that can be an article on its own. What I may want to clear up is that Nigeria was not referred to as a ‘giant of Africa’ because we had actually attained that status. It was in recognition of its enormous POTENTIAL in terms of population and material resources that gave us the moniker. We were just ‘work-in-progress’.

Up and About Nigeria

Have you ever travelled around Nigeria with the motive of appreciating the diversity in the different cultures, ethnicities and complexities that make up the country? These are things worth celebrating.

Nigeria has so much that is yet to be tapped, Nigeria has so much potential, Jim O'Neil's MINT theory states that the concerned countries economies have the potential to grow rapidly in the next three decades. This has been said about Nigeria over and over though. Nigeria has been called the giant of Africa, it is the most populous black nation. But does a country not need to appreciate what it has and its past to move forward?

Nigeria celebrated the centenary of its amalgamation this year, but I have to say that there was no real impact on Nigeria despite the series of events that were held for certain people in Abuja. I would have thought that this would be a time to dwell on the things that haven't worked, and what makes Nigeria the country it is, then come up with ideas to make the nation stronger.