Where were you on the first day of October, 1960?  Those who were not born then can take a honourable bow and remain . But for those of us, the surviving relics of a disappearing clan, it is time to ask some hard questions. Unlike human organisms that die and perish at once, never to be seen or heard of again, a nation can go through several incarnations. It can die and be revived. It can get up from the life support machine and walk away. It can surprise mourners at its own funeral wake by suddenly stirring and smiling. Nigeria has survived its most determined obituarists.

But removing those who were not born on October 1st  1960, that is those under the age of fifty five, leaves a paltry fifteen per cent. Over the intervening decades, Nigeria has become a very young country indeed. Having spent the past fifty years railing and ranting about the iniquities and inequities of Nigeria on every independence anniversary, perhaps it is time to take another approach, to see how far we have come and how far we have fallen behind.

This exercise is like taking a mental audit of the nation, viewing the nation through the mind’s eye.  A nation is a permanent work in progress which requires sober introspection and even more sober interrogation. All the excoriations and bitter recriminations will neither exorcise the ghosts of the terrible past, nor will they usher in a more glorious future. Nations founder when they are founded on lazy sentiments and idle wishful thinking.

Better still that this mental audit, this cerebral cinematography, takes place in a foreign land, away from the hectic hurly burly of a post-colonial African nation permanently on the boil and eternally on the brink. More often than not, it is good for one’s sense of perspective to borrow seasons and tropes from an alien land. October 1st found yours sincerely in a dozing reverie inside a cab in Dallas driven by a wonderful hybrid of a man: an ebony black person with Arabian and oriental features superimposed on a melancholic visage which make him faintly unsettling.

http://thenationonlineng.net/some-times-in-the-life-of-nigeria/