This book is not an attack on Nigeria. It is an intended diagnosis. It is the
painful, urgent whisper we have all ignored, now shouting from these pages.
I did not write it as an outsider, but as a son of this soil—raised in its
complexities, wounded by its failures, and stubbornly hopeful for its dawn.
I write with my father's stories of a Nigeria where a university degree was
government funded, not privately paid for. I write with my mother's resilience
in my veins, the same resilience that makes a Nigerian mother today sell akara
in darkness to pay a child's school fee.
I write for the mothers in our communities, who quietly feed their hungry
children, asking no one for nothing. I write for the uncles—men of integrity
who built businesses with sweat, not connections. I write for my brothers and
sisters and all those staring at a future that feels like a shrinking room.
Our nation is not poor. We are a land of breathtaking wealth—in oil, in gas,
in fertile soil, and above all, in the irrepressible genius of our people. Yet, we
are living in a state of managed decay. What we face are not acts of God, but
man-made crises, cultivated by neglect, watered by corruption, and harvested
as despair.
Every major national collapse in history began as a small, ignored problem.
This book is that ignored problem, now grown tall and dark. It is a map of our
gathering storm. It is also, if we dare to act, a manual for survival.