Paradoxica Nigeriana

By Dan Amor

Nigeria is a beautiful edifice built with bricks of contradictions. Somewhere between the idea and the reality hovers a huge geographical abstraction that beguiles the imagination. Situated at the Eastern end of the Gulf of Guinea, between the 4th and the 14th Parallels, Nigeria occupies a total area of 923,768 square kilometres, slightly more than the combined areas of France and Germany. From Lagos in the South-west to Maiduguri in the North-east is the distance between London and Warsaw.

*President Buhari 

Its population estimated at about 190 million, exceeds the combined population of all other countries in the West African sub-region of the Sahara. Endowed with enormous wealth, a dynamic population and an enviable talent for political compromise, Nigeria stood out in the 1960s as the potential leader of Africa, a continent in dire need of guidance. For, it was widely thought that Nigeria was immune from the wasteful diseases of tribalism, disunity and instability that remorselessly attacked so many other new African states. But when bursts of machine gunfire shattered the pre-dawn calm of Lagos its erstwhile Federal Capital in January 1966, it was now clear that Nigeria was no exception to Africa's common post-independence experience.