For this to happen, we need an altruistic and visionary leader with a nationalistic mindset who understands the complex craft of nation-building and what it truly means to have a thriving and truly sovereign nation
One profoundly aching aspect of Nigeria’s leadership problem, which has left the nation teetering on the precipice of a failed state, is its becoming an aid-dependent country. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Nigeria’s history and how it wasted its glorious years and squandered its enormous wealth will be consumed by anger and sadness over Nigeria’s reliance on aid from foreign countries, many of which we should be on the same level with development-wise.
On Wednesday, September 3, the United States Government announced donating $32.5 million to the United Nations World Food Programme to address the hunger crisis in Nigeria’s conflict-affected regions. The money will be used to provide food and nutrition assistance to approximately 764,205 vulnerable individuals in the North-East and North-West regions of the country, a statement released by the US Embassy in Abuja on Wednesday, disclosed.
This is one of many financial aids that have been provided by the US to Nigeria over the years after it started grappling with an existential security crisis over a decade ago. Aside from the government inability to guarantee safety and security of the people, it resorts to foreign aid to deal with the fallout of the perennial security crisis — which is often accompanied by loss of lives and properties and large-scale displacement of many hapless Nigerians — is are a tough pill to swallow for citizens with a sense of history who know where we used to be and where are today.
We have become an aid-dependent nation because our leaders wanted things to turn out that way. They wanted a nation incapable of treating its people with dignity and forging its own path. The insecurity that created the circumstances that made Nigeria a foreign aid destination is by design and not natural. The people who benefit from having an insecure Nigeria and the foreign aid that comes into the country will not want a stable and peaceful Nigeria. Any serious government that understands what being a sovereign nation means will do everything with its power to tackle the insecurity that fuels the foreign aid.
Many can’t wrap their head around how a nation that used to give aid to poor, struggling, cash-strapped foreign nations, helping them pay salaries, pensions and playing a key role in their development, is now depending on aid to stay afloat. They wonder how a nation that spent millions of dollars funding resistance groups and independence struggles in African countries fell from grace and became a mendicant nation that relies on foreign financial help to fulfil its obligation to its much-tried citizens. We are now mentioned in the same breath as Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Mali and other war-ravaged and unstable nations.
One of the dangers of being an aid-dependent country, apart from its ignominy, is that it exposes the receiving nation to destructive foreign influences and undermines its independence. When a nation becomes dependent on foreign aid from any country for anything for too long it begins to lose its sense of nationhood as it would have, wittingly or unwittingly, handed key aspects of what underpins its sovereignty and what shapes its existence as a nation to the aid-giving nation and benefactor. And this is where Nigeria is at this critical juncture in its history. It’s not too late to halt the troubling slide into this bottomless pit of a vassal state and begin to forge our own paths and change our destiny.
For this to happen, we need an altruistic and visionary leader with a nationalistic mindset who understands the complex craft of nation-building and what it truly means to have a thriving and truly sovereign nation that does not go cap in hand or genuflect before other nations to help solve simple and basic needs and problems that it should be able to address.
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