Nigeria’s dearth of ambition

By Suleiman A. Suleiman
Mon, 12 May 2025 1:59:54 WAT

As a person’s worth is no greater than their ambition, so too is a nation’s. What precisely is Nigeria’s ambition? What is our rightful place under the sun? And more specifically, what has been Nigeria’s ambition since our return to democracy in 1999?
In the next few weeks, this government, like those before it since 1999, will be celebrating our so-called 26 years of “uninterrupted democracy”. School children will be made to sing songs all across the country. Soldiers and policemen will host parades and other magical displays of strength and force. Political leaders at all levels will give speeches extolling their own virtue and patting themselves in the back for sundry achievements. Political merchants of all colours will buy space singing the praises of the sitting president and governors in both print and electronic media of all kinds.
None of these escapes the reality of our country today, however. Nigeria is where it is now precisely because this is where we have, willy nilly, aspired to be. If there is a single but constant characteristic that has defined our government, politics and society over the past 26 years of our so-called unbroken democracy, it is a punishing lack of ambition. It is hard to fathom, and harder still to accept, but it is true. In 26 years, we have not genuinely aspired to be greater than where we are now.
Let’s take the nature and substance of our government since 1999. You may have noticed it too, but if you have not, then think about this. The template for government in Nigeria since 1999 has by now been cast in stone for all to see. That template is tokenism. A new leadership arrives office for a term of four, and then eight years. The new leadership will scrub here a little, and scrub there even less. They will find one or two small things to do, or more commonly, something small to do but to talk big about. They will continue to talk big about the small things they have done, or even just the small things they are trying to do. And soon enough, their four or eight years are up, and they exit the stage without even scratching the surface of one or more of our most serious challenges as a country.
Since even before 1999, Nigeria has had about 14,000 megawatts of installed electricity capacity, about 7,000MW distribution capacity, and generally less than 6,000MW of actual usage. This has remained the same today, despite the doubling of the population since then or the fact that, at the barest minimum, Nigeria needs say 30,000 megawatts of functional electricity supply daily to begin to take its rightful place under the sun.
About 3.5 million people enter the labour market annually, and overall, about 87 million Nigerians live below the poverty line, according to a 2023 World Bank report. We should, at least, be thinking of lifting 50 million people out of poverty and opening up opportunities for 2-3 million formal, though not necessarily office, jobs during the next decade.
The last significant expansion in our healthcare infrastructure was the late General Sani Abacha’s 36 federal medical centres – nearly 30 years ago. At the bare minimum, we should be thinking one or two more such functional facilities in each state. We need between 50 to 100 new cities to meet the more than 20 million units of housing deficit we face for our ever-burgeoning population. Nigeria needs at least 6,000 kilometres of rail lines to connect Lagos to Kano, Sokoto to Calabar, and Maiduguri/Yola to Lagos, if we truly mean business on the world or continental stage. Our primary and secondary education has all but collapsed, and requires a root and branch shake-up, not to mention the tertiary education sector itself. Above all, I think, we need a whole new national value system that is enforced by both the state and society, and one that gives real meaning to “Nigeria” in every heart.

These are only some of our major challenges. Governments have come and gone at all levels since 1999. Yet, hardly any of them has taken an axe to bring down one or more of these problems. A major reason for this is the lack of ambition and imagination at the heart of our governance system. The colonial government completed the 1,340-kilometer railway line from Lagos to Kano between 1898 and 1912, a period of just 14 years. That’s ambition.

In the 26 years since 1999, by contrast, we have only managed to build about 350 kilometres of railways along Abuja-Kaduna and Lagos-Ibadan networks. Never mind that these are not even new networks, but a revival of what the colonialists left behind that collapsed during the ensuing years following “independence”. Never mind, also, that Nigeria’s population has since quadrupled, since 1960. That’s a clear lack of ambition.

We can say much the same about roads, about the only thing Nigerian governments understand when they talk about infrastructure. Almost all the road networks in Nigeria since 1999 have remained “under construction”, that is, uncompleted. Almost all of them, with the exception of the Lagos-Calabar Highway, are old roads, not new ones, which means the challenge is only “rehabilitation”, the term much favoured by our governments. The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is less than 130 km. The Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano Road is about 375km.The Lagos-Benin Express way is slightly less than 500 km, to cite a few examples, have been under “reconstruction” or “rehabilitation” at various times since 1999. None of them has been fully completed.

Meanwhile, for all the delays, Algeria still managed to complete the 1,216km East–West Highway in much less time, while Egypt upgraded its national grid from 11,000MW to 27,000MW in just about five years. Talk about ambition. Many of our state governments now shamelessly take up to two or more years to complete a 5km township road, just to demonstrate how low we have sunk as a nation.

Another problem is the inability to think independently about governance. In Nigeria, the problem is governance, and its solutions are both externally induced by foreign actors, with little critical inputs or adaptations from our own governments. You will notice this in the broad policy priorities of our governments, and in the specific policy prescriptions for solving development problems.

Consider, for example, the terms “palliatives” or “poverty alleviation”. Both terms are structurally and functionally useless in the context of Nigeria. Yet, they are routinely and copiously invoked by our governments as the basis of economic development policy. The Buhari government, for example, spent about N3.5 trillion on palliatives and poverty alleviation programmes. And that’s not to mention the trillions Obasanjo and his successors wasted on Keke NAPEP and similar policies in the name of “alleviating” poverty. The current Tinubu government, also, took the so-called “bold” step to remove fuel subsidy and unleash hell on Nigerians largely because it felt that it would dish out “palliatives” of cash transfers of N25,000 each to 25 million families in order to target or benefit 60 million Nigerians.

The economics of palliatives and poverty alleviation have their place, but that place is absolutely not the current Nigeria. Palliatives and poverty alleviation are useful only in the contexts of low levels of poverty, and usually to help people through a specific situation or shock. If you have more than 87 million people living below the poverty line in your country, that is, well above one-third of the total population, then neither palliatives nor alleviation applies to you. You will need something much more serious, much more ambitious, because it is demeaning and dehumanising to have that many people living on handouts, which anyone in government must know.
But then again, the World Bank and IMF reports usually don’t say that, and our own governments don’t always ask. Otherwise, Buhari’s N3.5 trillion could have been used to launch our steel and automobile industry, or to hire five million young people into a temporary army to build the roads, bridges and railways. So, again, we are where we are because this is where we want to be.