For those who fought colonial rule, Uhuru meant self-determination, dignity and the right of a people to shape their own destiny. By that broader measure, Nigeria is independent, but it is not yet Uhuru. We have made considerable progress on the question of civilian rule; the harder question is what that democracy has delivered to the ordinary citizen. Political independence gave us sovereignty. The task before us now is to make that sovereignty meaningful in the everyday lives of Nigerians.
By Shu’aibu Usman Leman
Sixty-six years after independence and 27 years of uninterrupted civilian rule, Nigeria has crossed important historical thresholds. But the harder task remains, that of turning political sovereignty and democratic continuity into security, economic opportunity, accountability and dignity for the ordinary citizen.
Tomorrow, Thursday, 1 October 2026, Nigeria turns 66. It is also 27 years and four months since the return of uninterrupted civilian rule in 1999—the longest continuous period of civilian government in our post-independence history. That achievement should neither be dismissed nor taken for granted. Nigeria has lived through coups, military interventions, civil war and constitutional ruptures, and the First Republic lasted only a few years before the country entered a long and turbulent period of military rule. The fact that civilian government has now endured for more than a quarter of a century is therefore historically significant. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu himself, in his June 2026 Democracy Day address, described the period since 1999 as the longest stretch of civilian rule in Nigeria’s history.
Yet, as I reflect on 66 years of independence and 27 years of uninterrupted democracy, I find myself returning to an old word from East Africa, Uhuru. The Swahili word for freedom and independence came to represent much more than the lowering of a colonial flag and the raising of a national one. For those who fought colonial rule, Uhuru meant self-determination, dignity and the right of a people to shape their own destiny. By that broader measure, Nigeria is independent, but it is not yet Uhuru. We have made considerable progress on the question of civilian rule; the harder question is what that democracy has delivered to the ordinary citizen. Political independence gave us sovereignty. The task before us now is to make that sovereignty meaningful in the everyday lives of Nigerians.
One of the things that strikes me most about our democratic journey is how accustomed we have become to elections. Since 1999, Nigerians have gone to the polls in 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015, 2019 and 2023, and we are already looking towards 2027. That continuity matters, particularly given our history, but democracy cannot be reduced to the periodic casting of ballots. Its deeper test is whether citizens possess meaningful power over those they elect. Can a citizen look at a local government chairman and genuinely believe that persistent failure will have consequences? Can a governor be certain that the people he governs will hold him accountable for the condition of their schools, hospitals, roads, water supply and security? Can an elected official take the electorate for granted without paying a political price? These are the questions that matter after the excitement of election day has passed.
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The health of democracy is also reflected in citizens’ willingness to participate in it. INEC’s figures show that presidential-election turnout fell from 53.7 percent in 2011 to 43.6 percent in 2015, 34.7 percent in 2019 and 26.7 percent in 2023. The figures alone do not explain why millions of Nigerians stayed away from the polls, but they should make us uncomfortable enough to ask whether citizens still believe that elections can materially change the quality of government they experience. We have become adept at the ritual of elections; the harder task is to build a culture of accountability in which public office holders understand that elections are not merely occasions for seeking another mandate, but instruments through which citizens can demand performance. The ballot must mean more than the act of voting. It must confer real power on the citizen.
This is why local government matters so much. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision on local-government financial autonomy created an important constitutional opening, but the subsequent experience demonstrates why legal reform must ultimately be judged by its consequences. Questions about implementation have continued, including disputes over whether local councils are exercising the financial independence contemplated by the judgment. This is precisely the distinction that matters because autonomy is not simply a question of who receives the money; it is whether citizens can identify a government at the grassroots that is responsible for results and can be held accountable for them. Autonomy on paper will mean little if it does not produce better schools, functioning primary healthcare, cleaner communities, better roads, water and greater accountability. Democracy must not merely be visible in Abuja; it must be felt in Abia, Oyo, Bauchi and every other state, local government and ward. It must reach the place where the citizen encounters government most directly.
There is a similar contradiction in our economy. Since the return of civilian rule, Nigeria has experienced substantial economic expansion and remarkable growth in telecommunications, financial technology and the creative industries. These achievements are worth celebrating because they demonstrate what Nigerians can accomplish when talent, enterprise and opportunity meet the right conditions. Yet Nigeria’s economic story since 1999 is neither one of simple failure nor uncomplicated success.
The World Bank reports that real GDP grew by 4.2 percent in the first half of 2026, while the National Bureau of Statistics reported 4.43 percent growth in the second quarter. These are significant improvements, but the World Bank also warns that growth remains insufficient to generate enough productive jobs or materially reduce poverty. It estimates that 69.6 percent of Nigerians were below the lower-middle-income poverty line of $4.20 a day in 2025.
This is why GDP growth, important as it is, cannot be the only measure of economic independence. The real measure of an economy is what it enables ordinary people to do with their lives. Can they can find productive work, establish and grow businesses, afford food and housing, rely on electricity, access quality education and healthcare, and build a future without believing that the only route to dignity is a visa and a plane ticket? Nigeria spent decades producing crude oil while depending heavily on imported refined petroleum products. That dependence is beginning to change as domestic refining capacity expands, but the larger question remains whether Nigeria can turn its natural resources, human capital and entrepreneurial energy into broad-based prosperity.
The Federal Government has rightly emphasised the importance of moving from macroeconomic stabilisation and reform to stronger production, jobs, incomes and opportunity. But the test of reform ultimately lies beyond official statistics, it lies in whether households feel that their economic lives are becoming more secure.
There is another contradiction that I find equally difficult to ignore, that of the distance between the Nigeria we proclaim in law and the Nigeria that many citizens experience in everyday life. Our national anthem speaks of a country in which, “though tribe and tongue may differ”, we stand in brotherhood. It is a beautiful aspiration, and our diversity remains one of the country’s greatest strengths, but anyone who has lived through Nigeria’s recent history knows that our reality is more complicated.
Religion, ethnicity, region and identity continue to influence political competition and, in too many instances, perceptions of access and opportunity. The problem is not our diversity; the problem begins when diversity becomes a currency for exclusion. Citizenship should not become more or less valuable depending on where one comes from, what language one speaks or which religious community one belongs to.
This becomes particularly urgent when we consider security. I think especially of communities in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, where years of conflict have produced displacement, disrupted livelihoods and placed enormous pressure on basic services. For people who have lost homes, livelihoods or loved ones, the abstract promise of democracy can feel very distant. But insecurity is not only a North-Eastern problem; it is a national question.
The World Bank continues to identify insecurity, including banditry, kidnapping and insurgency, alongside weak job creation, infrastructure gaps and limited state capacity as major challenges facing Nigeria. A democratic state must ultimately be judged by whether it can protect its citizens and create the conditions in which they can live without fear. After 27 years of uninterrupted civilian rule, therefore, we should be able to ask a simple but fundamental question: Are Nigerians safer, freer and more confident about their future? The answer will not be the same everywhere, but the question must remain at the centre of our national conversation.
Democracy is not merely about preventing soldiers from taking power. It is about building a state capable of protecting its citizens, expanding opportunity and giving people a meaningful stake in the future. That is why the next phase of Nigeria’s democratic journey must be concerned not simply with continuity but with performance. We should be able to say that the institutions we have built are becoming more capable, that public resources are producing better outcomes, that citizens have greater confidence in the law and that government is increasingly accountable to the people. The question is no longer simply whether civilian rule can survive. It is whether civilian rule can become sufficiently effective to justify the faith citizens place in it.
At 66, I do not believe Nigeria needs another grand theory. We need to do a few fundamental things and do them seriously. We need a democracy in which electoral institutions are trusted, electoral justice is timely, public office is accountable and local government is capable of responding to the needs of the people. We need an economy in which every state aspires to become a centre of production rather than merely an allocation centre, producing, processing, manufacturing, innovating and exporting. Agriculture, manufacturing, mining, technology, tourism, the creative industries and modern services all have a role to play. Our enormous population should not be viewed simply as a market; it should be our greatest productive asset. We need an economy that gives people reasons to stay, reasons to invest and reasons to believe.
Above all, we need to renew the bargain between power and responsibility. The generation that won independence has passed the baton. The generation of journalists, civil-society activists, labour leaders and ordinary citizens who resisted authoritarianism and helped keep civic space alive during the years of military rule also played its part. Now another generation must take responsibility. My concern is that we have sometimes taught young Nigerians to aspire to power without teaching them sufficiently what power is for. Public office is not a prize, political influence is not personal property, and leadership is not an inheritance. Power is a trust. Nigeria needs an elite culture in which privilege carries responsibility, office carries accountability and leadership carries service.
Perhaps the most honest way to describe Nigeria at 66 is to say that we are living through an unfinished transition. We have moved beyond colonial rule, survived the turbulence of military intervention and sustained civilian democracy for more than a quarter of a century. We have crossed important historical thresholds, but we have not yet arrived at the Nigeria that independence promised. We occupy an uncertain space between what we have escaped and what we have yet to become—no longer defined by the old struggles, but still carrying many of their consequences. This is what I mean by our unfinished middle. It is not a period of failure, but neither is it a destination worthy of complacency. It is the difficult space between political achievement and national fulfilment; between having the formal institutions of freedom and making freedom meaningful in everyday life; between possessing political sovereignty and having the economic capacity to exercise it; between choosing governments and ensuring that those governments deliver.
The danger is that this unfinished middle can become a permanent condition. We can become so accustomed to recurring crises, temporary fixes and modest advances that we begin to confuse survival with transformation. We can congratulate ourselves that democracy has endured without asking whether it is delivering enough. We can celebrate economic growth without asking whether it is creating enough productive work and opportunity. We can invoke national unity while ignoring the inequalities, exclusions and identities that continue to shape the lived experience of citizenship. We can spend another generation explaining why Nigeria has not yet arrived while postponing the decisions that might actually take us there. The challenge of the next 27 years, therefore, cannot simply be to preserve what we have inherited. It must be to improve what we have inherited.
That is why the next 27 years cannot simply be another chapter in Nigeria’s story of endurance. They must be about closing the distance between the Nigeria we have and the Nigeria we imagined. We must move from democratic continuity to democratic performance; from political independence to economic capability; from constitutional rights to lived dignity; and from asking merely who governs Nigeria? to asking the more consequential question of how Nigeria can work for the Nigerian. That question has particular meaning for me. Having served as National Secretary of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), I cannot look at this journey as a detached observer. I have witnessed the courage with which Nigerians defended the space for free expression and democratic participation when both were under considerable pressure. I have seen what it took to keep hope alive. I have also learnt that democratic survival, important as it is, cannot be mistaken for democratic success. We fought for the right to choose our leaders; we must now insist that those leaders are accountable for what they do with that mandate.
The generation that won independence has passed the baton. The generation that resisted military rule and helped sustain the civic space has done its part. The responsibility now falls increasingly on those who will inherit the Nigeria we are shaping today. They must not simply inherit positions, privileges and political networks; they must inherit a sense of duty. Public office must be understood as a trust, not a prize; political influence as responsibility, not entitlement; and leadership as service, not possession. If we fail to establish that understanding, we risk reproducing the very weaknesses that have kept Nigeria suspended between promise and performance. But if we can establish it, then the institutions of democracy can begin to acquire the culture of responsibility without which institutions alone cannot transform a society.
For me, therefore, the meaning of Uhuru has changed with time. In 1960, it meant freedom from colonial rule. Today, it must mean something deeper, the freedom to live securely, to work productively, to participate meaningfully in public life and to believe that one’s circumstances need not determine one’s destiny. It must mean a Nigeria in which a child born in Bauchi can imagine a future without having to leave Bauchi to find it; in which a young entrepreneur can build a business without spending more energy navigating dysfunction than creating value; in which public institutions are strong enough to protect the vulnerable and accountable enough to restrain the powerful; and in which citizenship confers not merely legal status but dignity and opportunity.
We have come a very long way since 1960, and we should acknowledge that without apology. We have survived political crises that might have broken less resilient countries. We have maintained civilian government through constitutional processes and peaceful transfers of power. We have built industries and institutions that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. We have produced entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, journalists, professionals and civic actors who have demonstrated repeatedly that Nigeria’s greatest resource is not oil, but the capacity and resilience of its people. But independence was never meant to be the end of the journey. It was the beginning. The last 66 years gave us a sovereign country; the next chapter must give that country greater capacity to deliver on the promise of its independence.
The question before us is therefore no longer simply whether Nigeria can survive. We know that it can. The question is whether we can convert endurance into progress, institutions into outcomes and citizenship into a genuine experience of belonging, dignity and opportunity. As Nigeria turns 66, I do not want simply to celebrate what we have survived. I want us to think honestly about what Nigeria can still become. I do not want us merely to defend the fact that democracy has endured. I want us to ask what that democracy must now deliver. And I do not want Uhuru to remain a word borrowed from another African liberation struggle to describe a freedom that always seems to lie somewhere beyond the horizon.
I want us to make it real.
That is the unfinished work. That is the responsibility that comes with having inherited a sovereign nation and a functioning democracy. And perhaps, as we look towards the next four years, the most useful question we can ask ourselves is also the simplest:
What is the single thing that, if we fixed it, would make you feel that Nigeria is finally moving towards true Uhuru?
