OCTOBER 1 is celebrated as Nigeria’s Independence Day. But Nigeria isn’t independent. It is, for all practical purposes, a dependent state, a satellite state, whose political and cultural elites are still tethered to the coattails of colonialism and neocolonialism.
Its economy is almost literally run by the World Bank and the IMF, and the older the country gets, the more it seems to tighten the apron strings that tie it to its former colonial overlord. No one illustrates this contradiction and emotional dissonance more dramatically, not to mention more symbolically, than President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who chose to depart for the United Kingdom, Nigeria’s former colonizer, for a two-week annual leave just a day after celebrating Nigeria’s so-called 64th independence from British colonialism. To publicize traveling to rest in a country that colonized you, a day after celebrating freedom from that country’s colonialism is the ultimate national self-ridicule.
It’s like a woman throwing a party to celebrate her emancipation from an oppressive relationship with a wild brute, only to show up at her ex-partner’s doorstep the next morning to seek validation. A president choosing to spend personal time in the country that once colonized his own projects an image of lingering dependence on the former colonial power. It’s an implicit endorsement of the cultural and societal norms of the colonizer over those of the home country and raises questions about national pride and t.
