Addressing Nigeria’s Challenges – Late Obafemi Awolowo Submissions

Awolowo’s Prophecy Fulfilled: Ignorance, Not Tinubu, Is Nigeria’s Problem
The Unfairness of Blaming Tinubu for a 70-Year Policy Debt

 A Prophecy Written in 1947

In 1947, 13 years before independence, Chief Obafemi Awolowo published his classic “Path to Nigerian Freedom“. It was not a campaign pamphlet. It was a blueprint and a warning. His thesis was simple: Nigeria’s survival depended on two things ” mass education and planned economy”.

Without them, independence would deliver “freedom in name only” and end in “tribalism, corruption, and chaos”. He was just 38 years. In another of his books, he described 1947 as his most productive year.

Today, 78 years later, the “catastrophe” he predicted is no longer prophecy. It is our daily news. Mass illiteracy, unemployment, armed robbery, banditry, kidnapping, and regional insecurity.

To pretend this started on May 29, 2023 is to deny history. It also makes the current attempt to fix the problem under President Bola Tinubu, the wrong target for blame.

 Awolowo’s Core Prediction:

Ignorance and Economic Downturn is Insecurity Awolowo built his argument on cause and effect.

On education; “Nigeria will be free in name only if her people remain in ignorance. Mass illiteracy is a time bomb under any democracy”. In “Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution” written from Calabar Prison in 1966, I was barely two years old then.

He was blunter: “A nation of illiterates cannot have a stable government. Ignorance breeds insecurity, and insecurity will consume us all”. No one listened.

No laissez-faire On The Economy

On economy, he rejected “laissez-faire” for Nigeria. He stated, “Without deliberate planning, we shall have poverty where there should be prosperity, unemployment where there should be work, and a ‘downtown’ of the economy where there should be progress”. He was ignored.

Here is the link; he declared, “When a man is ignorant and hungry, he becomes desperate. Desperation breeds crime, and crime breeds insecurity”. That is the exact formula Nigeria is living with today in the Northeast, Northwest, the Middle Belt. It has been imported to the Southwest from all flanks now.

I doubt if our leaders read Awolowo’s books or what he said in those books. They have the books in their shelves gathering dust while it’s politicians wear his cap as signature of their progressive passport. What a shame?

The Warnings and Political Punishment

The Warning Was Ignored and Politically Punished. Awolowo did not just write; he acted. As Premier of Western Region 1955-1960 he launched free primary education. In his Autobiography at Chapter 11, he said he did it because “no nation can rise above the level of its education”. He urged other regions to follow.

The response? He was mocked. They laughed at him. In “Path to Nigerian Freedom” at Chapter 8, it was recorded by Awolowo; “when we proposed free education and state-directed economic development in 1947, we were told it was utopian, it was socialism, it was impossible”. In the First Republic, leaders of the North chose a different path.

Emphasis on religion, religious education and patronage “handouts” over mass Western education. The result was a lopsided federation Awolowo warned would create an “insecure federation”. Here we are today.

He was later detained on treason charges in 1962. What scholars now call political blackmail for insisting on education and planning. The chicken was being told not to lay eggs. The children have been asked not to cry and women have been asked not to warm the beds of their husbands anymore.

 How the Chicken Has Come Home to Roost

Fast forward to 2026. The data matches Awolowo’s 1947 formula:

1. Ignorance: UNESCO and NBS data show the North still accounts for over 70% of Nigeria’s out-of-school children. Adult literacy rates in some States remain below 40%. Awolowo called this a “time bomb”. Today it is exploding as recruitment pool for bandits, Boko Haram, and political thugs. They whimsically blame Tinubu for not securing the nation.

2. Economic Downtown:

Decades of no deliberate economic planning, over-dependence on oil, Federal government institutions became the sharing partners of government funds by the northernoligachy and the religious counterparts.

The neglect of agriculture left millions idle and the deliberate destruction of industrial complexes. Awolowo predicted “unemployment where there should be work”. That idle youth is now the foot soldier of insecurity.

3. Insecurity:

From 2009 Boko Haram to today’s banditry and kidnapping, the pattern is the same; uneducated, unemployed young men. In his book “The Strategy and Tactics of the People’s Republic of Nigeria” at Chapter 2, Awolowo linked post-civil war insecurity directly to “neglect of education and economic planning in 1st Republic 1960-1966”. If it was true in 1970, it is truer in 2026.

In his reasoned view in “Voices of Reason” in 1981, Awolowo told the University of Ife. Staff and students that; “We were told in 1952 that free education was utopian. Today we see the price of that neglect in armed robbery, thuggery, and social decay”. Replace “armed robbery” with “banditry” and you have 2026.

5. Why Blaming Tinubu is Begging the Issue

President Tinubu assumed office May 29, 2023. The problems he met, that is, over 20 million out-of-school children, collapsed rural economy, insurgency, are 60-70 years in the making.

Awolowo’s logic is clear; you cannot blame the firefighter for the fire. You cannot blame the security guard and leave the burglar.

Tinubu’s policies, subsidy removal, forex unification, renewed push for education funding, are painful because they address the root Awolowo identified that is; economic distortion and underinvestment in human capital.

To blame him for “current problems” is to mistake the symptom for the disease and the doctor for the sickness. Unfortunately, many of our youths who hardly read but stay on their android phones and know nothing more than charting on social media, would be the first to jump into arguments.

They are dedicated to arguing from point of ignorance shamelessly exposing their weak mental capacity and lack of knowledge.

The real question is not “What did Tinubu do since 2023?” The real question is “What did we fail to do since 1947?”

6. Conclusion: Stop Pretending, Start Building

Awolowo ended his his view in his book ” Path to Nigerian Freedom” with a challenge to leaders. Nigeria ignored it. The North, more than any region, chose religion and handouts over schools and planning. Today we are all paying the price.

The insecurity in Nigeria did not start yesterday. It started the day we decided education was “utopian” and planning was “socialism”. As Awolowo said: “If you keep a man ignorant, you enslave him and endanger the whole society”.

If we are honest, the conversation must shift from blaming Tinubu to completing Awolowo’s unfinished work; universal education, deliberate economic planning, and regional equity. He has given each of the regions a Development Commission which is a wing to fly.

What have they done and what are they going to do is the gig question. Anything else is noise.

The chicken has come home to roost. The house mouse can no longer cry as a mouse again, the bird in the wild can no longer sing like a bird again, even human beings no longer have the capacity to act as humans.

Now, we must build a new cooperative of ideas and action to navigate this labyrinth of decades of monumental failure.

Tinubu has set the template of development for a new Nigeria.

Rather than the blame games, the insults, the threats, the self-denials and the conspiracy theories, we need to get ready for the challenges of raising our country from the cesspool of despondency to an audacity of action.

The choice lies before us.

Bio of Late Chief Obafemi Awolowo

Read More : Nigeria Celebrates Democracy Day -President Tinubu Speaks

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Source – Patriot Round Table WhatsApp Platform/ State Affairs

About the Author

Qasim Akinreti

Editor

A Multimedia International Journalist with Voice of Nigeria. Author, Media Trainer, and Consultant. Head Digital Media Department Voice of Nigeria

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