By BIG ZION
On October 1st, 1960, they lowered a foreign flag and raised our own. Our fathers danced. They thought freedom had finally come. They thought once the white man left, hunger would leave, suffering would leave, and life would become easy.
Sixty-six years later, we are still waiting for that easy life.
We’re not free! We are not free when a country that God blessed with crude oil, with fertile land, with gold, with brains, cannot give its people fuel to drive, food to eat, and light to see at night. We are not free when we sell oil to the world,d but we buy hardship at home. We are not free when the national grid collapses like a tired man and puts over two hundred million people in total darkness, and nobody is held responsible.
We are not free when a bag of rice costs more than the minimum wage and families have to choose between food and school fees. We are not free when naira keeps falling, and salaries lose value before the end of the month. Independence was supposed to bring economic prosperity, but today the average Nigerian is poorer, hungrier and more hopeless than his parents were in 1960. We are not free when going to the market is now like going to war. You carry money that is not enough for what you want to buy. Food has become a luxury and gold. Mothers now ration food like it is medicine. Fathers now lie to their children that they have eaten. Young men now skip meals and call it intermittent fasting, but it is not fasting; it is hunger. How did we get here? How did food become a privilege in a country where land is everywhere?
We are not free when our graduates have become strangers in their own country. We suffered to go to school. We paid school fees, we bought handouts, we stayed awake at night to read, we defended projects under sun and rain. And after all that suffering, there is no job. First class is jobless. Second class is jobless. Even the ones with connections are jobless. A young man finishes school at 23 and stays at home till 30 doing nothing, his certificate inside a dusty file, his brain wasting away. We did not go to school to become a burden, but Nigeria has turned graduates into beggars. The system trained us for jobs that do not exist.
And the worst part is, we are no longer even fighting to get jobs. We have accepted unemployment like it is normal. We have accepted that after NYSC, you will go back to your parents’ house and wait. We have accepted that you will learn a skill after your degree, not because you want to, but because your degree has failed you. How can a whole generation of youths wake up every day with no work to go to, no hope of work, and we say we are independent?
We are not free when our salaries are an insult to our suffering. For the few who even see work, you work for thirty days, you receive an alert, and before you get home, transport has taken half, foodstuff has taken half, and you are left with nothing. We are working, but we are still poor. We are employed, but we are still suffering.
We are not free when we cannot sleep with two eyes closed. Every day we wake up to news of kidnapping, of killings, of people being taken from their homes and asked to pay millions they don’t have. We watch videos of human beings crying for help, and we have become numb. We scroll, and we say “God forbid,” and we move on. We have normalised pain.
We are not free when the best dream of a young Nigerian is to leave Nigeria. Our doctors are leaving. Our tech boys, our creatives, our brightest minds are all packing bags. Our nurses are leaving. Our first-class graduates are washing plates abroad because abroad pays them with dignity. Not because they hate this country, but because this country has refused to love them back. When your own children are running away from home, that home is no longer a home; it is a burning building.
So I ask you again, what are we really celebrating?
Are we celebrating the flag that is blowing in the wind, or the freedom that we have never tasted? Are we celebrating independence, or just celebrating the calendar? Because a flag without food is just cloth. An anthem without freedom is just noise. A degree without a job is just paper. And independence without a better life for the people is just a word.
The British left us sixty-six years ago, but they did not leave us with chains. We made our own chains. And until we break those chains- the chain of bad leadership, the chain of greed, the chain of tribalism, the chain of our own silence. We will continue to gather every October 1st to celebrate a freedom we have not yet received. It is not yet Uhuru!
N.B: Uhuru is the Swahili word for Freedom
