Nigeria at 66: Good People? Great Nation?

Professor Mojisola Adeyeye laughed. Seconds before, a reporter had posed a question about whether Adeyeye, Director General of the National Agency for Food Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) intended to step down, amidst criticism of the agency’s suboptimal performance. They weren’t done with their question but apparently, the Professor was. She chuckled, stood up, sarcastically declared that she’d be stepping down, sat delightedly, and chuckled some more. Other officials laughed along with her. Nigerians came for NAFDAC’s press conference briefing on the proliferation of adulterated food substances, a concern deserving of utmost seriousness. Soundbites from the briefing indicate that, instead, citizen vigilance was prioritised as the first line of response, rather than the agency taking charge of a national crisis. And still, despite this obvious failing, they laughed. 

We might never really know what the DG and everyone else found funny. And even if we did find out, it wouldn’t take away from their response being sinister. Whatever drove those officials to the point of laughter is also the same spirit of malevolence behind citizens conniving to poison their compatriots with substandard, adulterated food. It is the ideal behind knowing the extent of harm done yet opting to maximise profit at all cost. Six decades and six years after becoming ‘one nation,’ the more unifying ideal isn’t patriotism or a belief in collective growth. It’s selfishness, disturbingly fetishised selfishness. The story is the same in Abeokuta, Abuja, and Abakaliki. Responsibility for restoring the nation’s image is stuck in bureaucracy limbo. The answer isn’t the government. Neither is it the citizens. It also isn’t both,  having evolved to include external actors. No one can seem to agree on whose burden it is.

At its most reductive, redemption of Nigeria’s image falls solely under the social contract. The government should lead the way. At auspicious gatherings like the recently concluded United Nations General Assembly, where President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was conspicuously absent, selling a marketable version of Africa’s most populous nation is expected. Foreign policy should ideally intertwine with public relations via the media and policy implementation to project an image of Nigeria. That’s tough to execute when foreign relations ministers and ambassadors have sworn faithfulness to Aso Villa rather than citizens; state and local governments, inclusive. In the heat of the recent Xenophobia wave in South Africa, the Ghanaian Government exerted strong measures to protect their citizens. Nigerian High Commissioner to South Africa, Femi Fani-Kayode, was a sharp contrast. Even within the country, there’s more regard for electioneering propaganda than there is for positive orientation. 

The botched 2009 Professor Dora Akunyili-led Ministry of Information ‘Good People, Great Nation’ campaign is one of the better examples of an inward attempt at engineering a new consciousness. Fresh out of a successful tenure rebranding NAFDAC’s image, she was a round peg for the round hole that was a national rebrand, toeing the line of the Olusegun Obasanjo Administration which was relatively successful at this image redemption on the debt policy front. But Nigeria’s round hole is deceptive, a void that consumed the $1 million campaign without any holistic ideological changes. Remember Buhari and Idiagbon’s forceful War Against Indiscipline program? Well, even that failed. You can’t whip a country into your preferred value shape. Not without addressing our inherent self-centred nature. 

For all intents and purposes, we are a relatively great nation. That much is hard to dispute even with today’s abysmal quality of life. Are we good people? No. Even at our most religious, we are not. The average Nigerian cannot look themselves in the mirror and proclaim ‘goodness’—far from an idealist sense of sinlessness or a moral tabula rasa, but more about how normalised harm to others has become. Older Nigerians speak about times when this used to be the norm, but in a post-Structural Adjustment Program world, that’s hard to believe. History itself is sometimes hard to believe; orally and even in autobiographical accounts, it’s largely distorted, with archival documentation showing otherwise. The concept of Good Samaritans walked its way out of scripture onto pulpits and stopped there. As insidious as tribalism and religious dogma are, both have still not convinced swathes of self-professed brothers and sisters to love each other as they would themselves. And in our arts and entertainment scene—literature being the most interrogating of the lot—this is prominent.

Segi from Lola Shoneyin’s now Ebony Life‐adapted novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, is one of the more popular examples of this death of selflessness, a virtue conflated for servitude. She’s an unfortunate sacrifice because Iya Segi wants to one-up Iya Tope who wants one over Iya Femi, all of whom view Bolanle as an enemy. Do not think for a minute that poisoning isn’t in the realm of reality. Worse cases abound in the ‘Crime’ and ‘Metro’ pages of Nigerian dailies. Think not that when Afolabi Olalekan’s Freedom Way portrays the dangers of being a good samaritan in modern day Nigeria, it is far from reality. In 2023, Olusegun Olajide, then Head of Legal Services at the Lagos Statew University Teaching Hospital, wrote extensively on the gap on Nigeria’s Good Samaritan Laws i.e. laws protecting individuals who render help to emergency victims, among others. He explained that while Section 2(1) of the Gunshot Victims Act provides that “every person, including security agents, should render every possible assistance to any person with gunshot wounds and ensure that the person is taken to the nearest hospital for immediate treatment”, and Section 11 “makes it an offence to stand by without rendering assistance to the victim,” there’s still a gap with Section 8 which is insufficient in protecting against ‘embarrassing interrogation’ from law enforcement. 

For context, a Good Samaritan Bill was first proposed in the House of Representatives in December 2015, passing a second reading in June 2016 and dying out after a third reading in April 2019. It recently resurfaced as part of Senator Ned Nwoko’s Bill for an Act to Alter the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, to Provide for Mandatory First Aid, Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, Automated External Defibrillator Training and the Adoption of Good Samaritan Laws, 2024, which passed first reading in January 2026. That it has taken this long for this law to be implemented is nightmarish. Innocent citizens are likely locked behind bars. Many more would have been saved if the average person wasn’t scared of being victimised for rescuing their fellow citizens. And in the instances when bystanders are willing to help, sometimes accident victims don’t even get to the hospitals. In March 2025, Bumpa co-founder, Adetunji Opaleye, was killed due to the reckless driving of one Abiola Odutayo. At the scene of the accident, Odutayo reportedly refused to convey the victim to the hospital, claiming that she didn’t want blood on her seat. By the time Opaleye made it to a third hospital, having been rejected at two others, he was pronounced dead. Odutayo was afterward arrested, but this didn’t stop her from supposedly boasting about her family’s connections. A world where the crowd of bystanders didn’t restrict her movement and the internet didn’t pull its weight isn’t one you’d prefer to imagine, but that’s the story of many.

If the average citizen implicitly believes in subverting due process, the government refuses to even pretend to care about her electorate, celebrities barely reflect the values professed, foreigners are themselves fighting similar battles in their home countries and have thus antagonised Nigerians, as a result, and the story being told is one where the men and women in the mirror don’t even know themselves enough to redeem their image, then what happens? Of what importance is a great nation without good people? These are the questions to ask in Nigeria’s 66th year as one nation under God or the universe or whomever it is we believe in that isn’t money. If these weren’t questions perennially explored in hundreds of thousands of essays before, then maybe suggestions wouldn’t come off as naïveté. And maybe some reading this wouldn’t feel as ticked off as you already are, angered at having to sit through yet another reflection on our national sin—if you would even consider this one. Compatriots suffering from internalised racism would sooner accept that it’s ‘an African thing,’ than accept that this conversation is far too grand to be tied to phenotype. As if we haven’t seen President Orange steer the free world into a bind. 

Any new leads as to who would redeem Nigeria’s image has to take West Africa’s giant for all it is, not shedding history completely, but accepting that certain things belong in the past. Image rebranding occurs everyday. If it’s not by sportswashing as with Qatar and Rwanda, it’s through controversial yet effective criminal justice reforms like El Salvador as done. Ultimately, the end goal for most states is to be dynamic enough to appear as a great nation of good people.  Our hope is that we can someday soon sit comfortably in that bracket. The work required isn’t forthcoming, but it’s our hope nonetheless to build a nation where peace and justice reign. We don’t need the kind of laughter heard at the NAFDAC press briefing. Nothing is funny, Nigeria.