Nigeria still groping in the dark – Tribune Online

LAST Saturday, March 28, 2026, made it 40 years since the former Premier of the Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, famously declined an invitation to contribute to the Nigerian Political Bureau of 1986. Then Military Head of State, General Ibrahim Babangida, had charged the 17-member bureau, chaired by Dr Samuel Joseph Cookey, to conduct a national debate on the political future of Nigeria. It was, amongst other things, tasked with “reviewing Nigeria’s political history and identifying the basic problems which have led to our failure in the past and suggest ways of resolving and coping with these problems.”

The bureau subsequently consulted political leaders across the country, including Chief Awolowo, who rejected the call. In his reply to the invitation, he asserted that the body had embarked on a fruitless search, noting that nothing clean, principled, ethical, and idealistic can work with Nigerians as long as they remain what they are. He suggested that the only solution to Nigeria’s socioeconomic struggles was a revolutionary change of attitude to life and politics, but expressed strong doubts as to that possibility. He concluded the letter with an ominous warning: an alternative option where Nigeria succumbs to permanent social instability and chaos.

Reproduced here is the reply of Chief Awolowo to SJ Cookey.

March 28, 1986

Dear Sir,

I received your letter of February 28, 1986, and sincerely thank you for doing me the honour of inviting me to contribute to the National Political Debate. The purpose of the debate is to clarify our thoughts in our search for a new social order. It is therefore meet and proper that all those who have something to contribute should do so.

I do fervently and will continue fervently to pray that I may be proved wrong. For something within me tells me, loud and clear, that we have embarked on a fruitless search. At the end of the day, when we imagine that the new order is here, we would be terribly disappointed. In other words, at the threshold of our New Social Order, we would see for ourselves that, as long as Nigerians remain what they are, nothing clean, principled, ethical, and idealistic can work with them. And Nigerians will remain what they are, unless the evils which now dominate their hearts, at all levels and in all sectors of our political, business and governmental activities are exorcised.

But I venture to assert that they will not be exorcised, and indeed they will be firmly entrenched, unless God Himself imbues a vast majority of us with a revolutionary change of attitude to life and politics or unless the dialectic processes which have been at work for some twenty years now, perforce, make us perceive the abominable filth that abounds in our society, to the end that an inexorable abhorrence of it will be quickened in our hearts and impel us to make drastic changes for the better.

There is, of course, an alternative option open to us. To succumb to permanent social instability and chaos. In the premises, I beg to decline your invitation.

I am yours truly, Obafemi Awolowo.

March 28, 1986 

Has Chief Awolowo been proved right?

Forty years on, many political observers told Sunday Tribune that Nigeria has only gotten worse socially and morally, with corruption pervasive and accountability almost non-existent for those close to power. The country continues to grapple with deepening insecurity, economic hardship, and a widening trust deficit between the governed and those in authority. For some, Awolowo’s warning now reads less like a distant possibility and more like a lived reality. They warn that Nigeria will continue to drown in the abyss if there is no positive change of attitude to life and politics in the near future.