Nigeria has not achieved greatness because of the many largely human and leadership challenges.
This was the argument of the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Most Rev. Matthew Hassan Kukah in the Pre-Convocation Lecture of Achievers University, Owo in On do state on the 11th of Novermber, 2019.
The removal of history from the country's education curriculum he said has made Nigerian youth "total strangers to their own local, cultural or national history".
The Bishop further said that the incursion of the military in governance in Nigeria did more harm than good. The military he said was "thoroughly ill equipped to govern, having no ideological slant towards negotiation and concensus... dug it's heels into politics and destroyed the foundations of law and order". The legacy of military rule accounts for the deep fractures and fissures on the polity.
Bishop Kukah took a swipe at what he called "They inability in Nigeria to allow free flow of ideas and channel individual and collective efforts" thereby creating "a culture of selfish pursuit and monopoly of power without responsibility". He said it is the reason "corruption is ubiquitous and now, strangely, seems to be the only thing that works in Nigeria".
Nigeria he said has no political culture and that is the reason for the seeds of prebendalismand clientelism where godfathers make their own rules or seek to compromise existing institutions.
