Thirty-five years after Chinua Achebe published his essay The Trouble with Nigeria, Nigeria continues to grapple with the same nine problems he enumerated. Following independence in 1960, neither its civilian nor military governments have shown a remarkable aptitude for managing state affairs, and it is this rudderless leadership that Achebe points to as the crux of Nigeria’s headache.

“The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership,” reads the first sentence in The Trouble with Nigeria. “There’s nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership,” he adds.

Achebe finds the political ideologies of Nigeria’s founding fathers rooted in “pious materialistic wooliness and self-centred pedestrianism” and bankrupt of the intellectual rigour exhibited in the writings of other African nationalists like Ghana’s Nkrumah and Tanzania’s Nyerere. Of the nation’s first president Nnamdi Azikiwe and prime minister Obafemi Awolowo, he suggests their fixation on personal ambition and wealth rather than selfless leadership predisposed the newly independent Nigeria to “disorderly growth and mental deficiency.”

In another chapter, Achebe argues Azikiwe’s desire to lead at all cost played a role in crippling nationalism and promoting mediocrity and tribalism, two plagues that ravish Nigeria to date. Upon losing the Western House of Assembly to Awolowo in 1951, Azikiwe returned to eastern Nigeria—his ancestral turf—in search of power and tribal support shunning the national aspirations he so professed and would have embodied had he stayed on as leader of the opposition.

With his political clout and newspapers, Azikiwe launched a campaign that ousted Eyo Ita, the leader of Government Business in Enugu, then moved to fill his cabinet with incompetents. Achebe notes the political manoeuvre not only fed into pre-existing suspicions of Igbo domination among minority tribes, to which Ita belonged, but signalled one of the first instances of mediocre leadership that has come to characterise Nigerian politics.

But reactionary tribal politics would not stop there. After the civil war ended in 1970, as Federal Commissioner for Finance, Awolowo implemented the punitive banking policy that left Igbos with 20 pounds regardless of what they owned as retribution for seceding from Nigeria.

Awolowo’s supervision of the legal defrauding of Nigerians as well as Azikiwe’s politically expedient tribalism leads Achebe to question their continued veneration, especially since unity, a concept the writer describes as impeachable for its dependence on the actor’s motives, is seemingly the bedrock of Nigeria’s democracy. Every general and president has been quick to proclaim Nigeria’s unity is non-negotiable, but questions abound over the insidious ways the government has strengthened tribal affiliations over nationalism through questionable political appointments, resource allocations and job placements in the name of affirmative action.

Corruption and the lack of patriotism are also mentioned as impediments to Nigeria’s progress. On the former, Achebe criticises the political class for syphoning public funds through inflated contracts and the payment of salaries to non-existent workers to the tune of 600 million naira a year, a sum he claims could have built three refineries or two new international airports.

“No[t] one high [ranking] public officer in the twenty-three years of our independence has been made to face the music for official corruption,” he writes.

Sadly, that statement holds true today. As for the lack of patriotism among Nigerians, Achebe points to the state’s inability to devise public policies that will benefit all citizens and not just a select few. He dismantles the definition of a patriot as someone who says they love their country and can recite the National Pledge by heart. That members of the privileged class can’t send their children to the Nigerian universities they attended in their youth or that Nigerian presidents don’t see the irony of receiving medical treatment abroad for minor ailments is a sign of misplaced allegiance, and yet they talk patriotically “to lay the ghost of their insecurity,” writes Achebe. “[Patriotism] does not exist in their heads, not in their hearts and certainly not in the work of their hands.”

Indeed, Nigeria’s past and present rulers have shown no desire to exemplify the trait they so often demand from the ruled, whom they have consistently abused and disappointed.

Another intractable obstacle Achebe identifies in his book is Nigeria’s inflated sense of self, an image propagated by its leaders and upheld by dubious refrains like The giant of Africa and This great country of ours. The idea that a country renowned for its kakistocracy and dangerously large population on the road to nowhere can promote such grandiosity without flinching mystifies Achebe. Still, the vacuous myth endures, even as Nigeria clawed its way to having the world’s highest number of out of school children, the world’s third highest infant mortality rate and the world's largest number of extreme poor.

If Nigeria is to become one of ten leading nations in the world as former president Olusegun Obasanjo declared many years ago during his stint as military head of state, then empty praises and wishful thinking need to be exchanged for a heavy dose of reality and hard work. As Achebe puts it: “Civilisation does not fall down from the sky; it has always been the result of people’s toils and sweat, the fruit of their long search for order and justice under brave and enlightened leaders.”

Although The Trouble with Nigeria adequately analyses Nigeria’s bankrupt leadership, it’s worth querying its central argument which places the country’s failures mainly at the feet of public servants. After all, private citizens from cashiers short-changing customers to superstar entrepreneurs profiting from intellectual property theft have exhibited the very same traits decried in elected officials. While it’s true that the fish rots from the head down, there’s no denying the importance of personal responsibility in effecting change.  

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