An Open Letter to Nigeria's Next President, on Our 66th Independence Day

Today, we celebrate 66 Years of Independence.

But before the flags come down in celebration, Nigerians deserve one honest conversation, and whoever becomes president next deserves to read it.

What Exactly Are Building Towards?

We're 3-4 months to the presidential election, and every season the same promises surface. Good roads. Steady electricity. A safer country. Functional schools that don't go on strikes.

These are not bad promises.

However they are not to be mistaken as a vision.

It is the baseline every government owes its citizens, the same way a hospital owes patients clean water and working lights before anyone calls it a good hospital.

Nobody builds a reputation on having clean water. It is simply what should already be there.

Our immediate problems as a nation shouldn't make us see things that way.

If every basic thing on that list were finally delivered tomorrow, what would Nigeria be building toward after that?

What do Nigerians actually want this country to become, In other words, what is Nigeria's long term vision?

African Union 2063 Plan (The Africa We Want) - Example of a Long-term Vision

In 2013, the African Union adopted something called Agenda 2063, nicknamed The Africa We Want. It is a fifty year framework, built around seven shared aspirations for the continent: genuine prosperity, real integration between African nations, strong and accountable governance, lasting peace, a confident cultural identity, development driven by Africans themselves, and a continent that finally negotiates from strength rather than dependency. It is implemented in rolling ten year phases, so that no single government owns it and no single administration can quietly let it die.

Rwanda did something similar on its own terms. After the devastation of the genocide, it built Vision 2020, a twenty year recovery plan focused on turning citizens into the country's core asset. When an independent review found that a quarter of its targets had already been met well ahead of schedule, Rwanda did not stop to celebrate and start over. It built Vision 2050 on top of it, aiming for upper middle income status by 2035 and high income status by 2050, broken into rolling national strategies that each government since has continued rather than discarded.

The point is not that these plans solved every problem. It is that they created a destination beyond the immediate problems of the day. Roads, power and security were treated as conditions for development, not the definition of development itself.

Nigeria has tried this before. We just never finish it.

It's not that we have a shortage of ideas though, we just don't finish them.

In 1996, Nigeria launched Vision 2010, a plan to meaningfully transform the country within fourteen years. It quietly disappeared with the administration that wrote it. In 2009, Vision 20:2020 took its place, an ambition to push Nigeria into the world's twenty largest economies by the year 2020. By the time 2020 actually arrived, the government of the day had moved on to something called the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan instead, and barely mentioned the vision it had replaced. When that plan expired too, the next administration introduced the National Development Plan 2021 to 2025, alongside a fresh document called Agenda 2050. A new administration arrived and, true to form, has largely charted its own course since.

Four visions in under thirty years. Four fresh starts. Not one of them was ever allowed to outlive the president who signed it.

A plan that cannot survive a change of government was never really a long term plan. You can call it a press release with an expiry date.

To whoever becomes president next

You will inherit roads that need fixing, a grid that needs rebuilding, and a security situation that demands real attention now, not in fifty years. Nobody is asking you to ignore any of that. Handle it, because it is the floor, and the floor matters.

But do not let your legacy end there. The most powerful thing you could do in office is not another four year plan with your name attached to it. It is committing, publicly and early, to a framework that is built to survive you, written with mechanisms strong enough that your successor inherits a continuation rather than a clean slate. Rwanda's leadership did not build Vision 2050 to flatter one administration. Kenya is not planning Vision 2060 to make one government look visionary. They built something bigger than any single office holder, on purpose.

Imagine being the president Nigerians remember not for promising roads, but for being the first in decades to hand the next administration a plan they chose to keep rather than replace.

To the rest of us

We carry some responsibility here too. As long as we keep rewarding candidates for promising to fix what should never have broken in the first place, we will keep getting leaders who stop there. The floor will keep being sold to us as the ceiling, election after election, because it works, because we keep buying it.

So on this Independence Day, the question worth sitting with is not simply whether the roads will finally get fixed. It is what kind of country do we want Nigeria to become three generations from now—and are we brave enough to demand that vision from the person who is about to lead it?

Sixty six years in, that conversation is long overdue.