By Akin Olukiran

On October 1, 2026, I turned 66. Sixty-six years is a long time in the life of a nation! Long enough, one would imagine, for a child to have found her feet, discovered her purpose and begun to justify the considerable expectations that accompanied her birth. Yet, as I prepared once again to celebrate my Independence Day, I could not help but wonder whether I have fulfilled the promise with which I entered the world.

I was born on October 1 1960 – beautiful, gifted and extraordinarily endowed. I inherited an enviable diversity of peoples and cultures, an abundance of natural resources and a land blessed with almost every ecological zone imaginable. Nature, it seemed, had been unusually generous to me. But I ended up having 36 sons. These are my states: 36 political offspring, each with a governor, a territory, a history and in varying degrees, an abundance of natural and human resources. Beneath them are my 774 grandchildren – the local government areas.

Every month, my sons make the pilgrimage to Abuja, my federal home, to collect their share of the family inheritance. With unbridled profligacy, they squander and fritter away these resources like the biblical prodigal son, only without his discernment, contrition or eventual repentance. Unashamedly, they return again, cap in hand, the following month, for yet another allocation. I sometimes wonder whether we have inadvertently raised a generation of dependants.

But I remember another Nigeria. Before my 36 sons came into existence, I had regions. And those regions understood something that my children appear to have forgotten: that prosperity is not merely distributed, it is created. The Western Region invested heavily in education and agriculture. The Northern Region began to harness its vast agricultural potential. The Eastern Region developed commerce, enterprise and industry. There was competition, not simply for political supremacy, but for development. Each region had an incentive to demonstrate that it could build, produce and prosper.

Then came 1966. The first military coup did more than change my political trajectory. The upheavals that followed gradually dismantled the federal architecture within which my regions had pursued distinctive development paths. Over the decades that followed, power, resources and responsibility became increasingly concentrated at the centre. And somewhere along that journey, my children learnt a dangerous lesson: that the road to prosperity ran through Abuja rather than through their own soil, ingenuity and enterprise.

The consequences have been profound. I became a federation in which the federal government is expected to do almost everything, while many of my constituent parts wait for the centre to provide the resources with which they might begin to do something themselves.

Yet there is an extraordinary paradox at the heart of my predicament. I am one Nigeria, but I am not one economy. I am a federation of profoundly different ecological, cultural, demographic and economic possibilities. Why, then, should every part of me aspire to become a replica of every other part? Sir Michael Lyons’s influential 2007 report on the future of local government in the UK provides a compelling intellectual framework for this dilemma. His concept of “place-shaping” emphasised the primacy of place – the creative use of powers and influence to promote the general well-being of a community and its citizens. Applied to my 36 sons, it suggests that development should not be a uniform prescription dispensed from Abuja, but a deliberate effort to understand, shape and unlock the distinctive potential of each place.

Why should a state blessed with fertile land not become an agricultural powerhouse? Why should another endowed with mineral resources not develop a serious mining and processing industry? Why should my coastal states not exploit their maritime economies? Why should states blessed with universities, young people and entrepreneurial talent not become centres of knowledge, technology and innovation? Perhaps the problem has never been that I lack resources. Perhaps I have simply failed to organise them intelligently. And this is why I find the current moment intriguing.

Quietly, under the current administration and perhaps without sufficient public recognition of its historical significance, Nigeria appears to be rediscovering an idea that should never have been abandoned: that national prosperity can be built through regional and sub-national development, rather than through perpetual dependence on the centre.

The language emerging from the present administration increasingly speaks of comparative advantage, sub-national competitiveness, regional development and the unlocking of economic potential beyond Abuja. The 2026 National Development Plan expressly identifies sub-national competitiveness based on comparative advantage as a development priority. The emergence of regional development commissions is equally significant.

This is not, as some might fear, a repudiation of Nigeria’s unity. Quite the contrary. A strong federation needs not mean 36 economically dependent states waiting perpetually for monthly allocations. It can mean 36 productive economies contributing to a stronger whole. There is an important distinction between political unity and economic uniformity.

And my 774 grandchildren must equally understand that local government should not merely be the lowest rung of political administration. It should be the foundation upon which grassroots economic development is built.

At 50, when I last told my story, through this same writer, in ThisDay newspaper on 11 December 2010, I was angry. I looked older than my years. Subsidy fraud was hemorrhaging my finances, foreign-exchange arbitrage was bleeding my economy, my educational institutions were struggling, and my children seemed more interested in fighting over my inheritance than in multiplying it. I ended that story by asking my children to repent, reform and give their mother something to celebrate when she turned 60.

I am now 66. I did not get everything I asked for. But perhaps with the ongoing reforms, I have finally begun to see the possibility of something more fundamental: a rethinking of how my enormous potential is organised. The answer may lie neither in excessive centralisation nor in fragmentation, but in a federation where each constituent part is encouraged to discover, develop and exploit its comparative advantage.

Let the North feed the nation and industrialise its agriculture. Let the South deepen its maritime, manufacturing and commercial possibilities. Let the East and West build upon their traditions of enterprise and innovation. Let mineral-rich states develop value chains rather than merely extractive economies. Let every state identify the economic DNA that makes it distinctive and then invest deliberately in turning that advantage into prosperity. And let Abuja do what a federal centre ought to do: provide the enabling environment, establish the rules, build national infrastructure, protect the federation and allow the constituent parts to flourish. My sons have spent too many years quarrelling over the inheritance. It is time they began creating wealth.

And perhaps this is the most important lesson for my grandchildren: a nation does not become prosperous because it possesses resources; it becomes prosperous when it learns how to convert those resources into productive capacity.

So, on October 1, when the flags were raised and the familiar songs of Independence reverberated across my 36 states and 774 local government areas, I celebrated, not because everything was well, but because perhaps, at last, we were beginning to understand what went wrong.

At 66, I do not need another birthday celebration paid for by money borrowed from tomorrow. I need productivity. I need enterprise. I need competition. I need responsible sons and industrious grandchildren. Above all, I need them to understand that I have never been poor. I have merely been prodigiously endowed and insufficiently organised.

My 36 sons have spent too long asking what Mother Nigeria can give them. Perhaps, at 66, it is time they asked themselves a more consequential question: What can we finally give our mother?

Olukiran, a social and political analyst wrote from London. He can be reached via: [email protected]