OUR beloved country, just like other great nations of the world, is all land and plantation, valleys, hills and mountains and, of course, the beautiful skies.

Not leaving out the beautiful people whom God have created to make all the above work for the common good of man himself.

By accident or unconscious assent, we all gather under the umbrella Nigeria; and 55 years of this union have brought out the best and the worst in us. The Nigerian Man!

In those years, the Nigerian man has developed from a novice to a man of knowledge, style and ideas; from a slave to a man of influence; from a boot licker to a strong man; from a nation in the dark to one seeking the light. Our quest is endless and our souls remain searching.

Many have come and gone, but the light constantly eludes us as a people. We have brainstormed and searched our souls for solutions, but it gets even blurrier by the day. Each moment of change only exposes how far we are from our quest. The question everyday becomes: Are we ever going to get there?
Where is there?

To a nation of about 170 million, there could mean more than 1 million things. For the sake of this short article it means one thing “development.”
Once upon a time, stacking groundnut, cocoa, cashew nuts, palm nuts etc. for export was a clear definition of a successful nation. Then selling crude oil by the barrels became the cool way to express success. All these seem like history now. What’s the next port we will call success?

A new wave of governance has come upon us; by design or by accident or by choice….it’s new in a lot of ways. But we don’t patronise persons or parties here, because even after the several changes in government our expectations haven’t changed. Or are we greedy to have asked? Or maybe we are not sure of what we want? Or we are just asking from the wrong people? Hmmm. We are often left bereft of hope, each time we consider our chances of ever arriving there.

Is it too much if travelling from Ikotun to Keffi is all on tarred road, with zero pot-holes? Am I greedy to request that we have clean nuclear power plants that guarantee power 24 hours seven days a week, with near zero interruptions? Maybe this will be the gateway to electricity cars, carts and airlines….oops! I must have spoken hurriedly! But is it bad asking?

What if our markets are clean, and free of stench and heaps of garbage? What if travelling to work can be either by road, rail, water or air or work-from-home; the options today are road or road! Hmmm! What if I need to worry less about what happens in government, because it’s a call to serve and not a call to loot?

What if I need not bother about drilling boreholes to get clean water, queuing at government offices for C of O and other documentations, knowing someone in the passport office to get a Passport re-issued, begging foreign embassies for a Visa, stay at home for a week to get counted in a census, leave home or work for two days to vote, doubt the pricing of my mobile calls or data usage, fear for my kids’ education, whether to school in Togo, Niger or Ghana because the education system here seems non-existent, fear falling ill because our doctors may just not be at work. Will I not be tagged ridiculous?!

What if each state was really independent and revenues from their natural produce was strictly theirs, with a portion accruing to the Federal? What if taxes were real and well established? What if our defence system was indeed impenetrable? What if local governments truly existed and performed their functions? What if our schools turn out curriculum that is not alien to our every-day life in Nigeria? What if our schools bring out the researcher/inventor/business person in each of us? What if we started manufacturing our cars, ships, and airplanes? What if we started developing our fabric and grow our food? What if we stopped transporting our PMS, Kerosene and diesel by trucks and relied on pipelines and closer refineries? What if our nation can be relied upon to provide the solution to all problems world- wide? What if we became so relevant as a people? What if I stop dreaming and see all these as reality in my lifetime?

• Omotoso is an accountant and financial analyst in Ikorodu, Lagos. Tel: 07065834971.