May our birthday not double as our death-day. I make that invocation in respect of my country, Nigeria, even though we are perennially stalked by death in the form of floods, Boko Haram, bandits and sundry agents of death. Annually, on October 1, I insist that the world pauses to take a deep breath and acknowledge that an entity named Nigeria impinges on its consciousness.
That’s the least I can ask for. Wasted Generation When, in 1984, the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka wrote off his generation as “wasted”, quite a number of public commentators felt that he was being too harsh on his generation and that there were so many things to celebrate about the first set of high flying post-Independence Nigerian graduates and freshly minted members of the social elite. At that time, the entity called Nigeria was only 24 years old as an independent African nation.
His reasons were quite understandable: “I compare today with dreams and aspirations we had when we all rushed home after studies abroad. We considered ourselves the renaissance people that were going to lift the continent to world standards, competitors anywhere. It hasn’t happened.
” Soyinka’s frustration with how the achievements of his generation had fallen short of their dreams for Nigeria was further underlined as he elucidated: “After a quarter of a century of witnessing and occasionally participating in varied aspects of social struggle in all their shifting tempi, dimensions, pragmatic and sometimes even i.
