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I warn you!!! This is a long read as written by Ayo Adene
I will tell you how I came by this piece. A picture of Folake Solanke in the Nigeria Nostalgia made someone direct me to this post.
In that post, Nrs Solanke was about being sworn in as Commissioner in the old Western Region and she was clad in a mini iro and Buba known back then as ‘bonfo’
My comment here
‘ I That is iro and buba tied in mini! These days, she will not become a Commissioner simply because her wrapper is short. She will be perceived as irresponsible. Oh how much we have changed! People pretending to be chaste in modern Nigeria especially in an admixture of a sharia compliant and Deeper Life culture.’ made Nya Offiong refer me to this read.
If you read nothing else on Nigeria this new year, please read this:
‘The Revolution That Should Not Have Happened’
In the 90s, a deluge of Pentecostal-type religion swept through Nigeria.
It submerged everything in sight.
No one was spared.
Paupers & princes, Mechanics & millionaires. Errbody got saved.
Overnight we went from not wanting to be identified with overt religion, to religion as a marker of normalcy.
Before the 90s, churches were filled with old women. As a kid, my dad stayed home on Sundays. Like most men did then. Nowadays, my dad preaches to me. Nowadays both men and women are in the front pews, jostling hard for who will be the first to enter the kingdom of God.
In my lifetime, it has become a respectable thing to be a religious Nigerian. The more fundamentalist the better.
Oh I remember when it was a shame to be called an “SU”: those were the ardent, simple believers who dressed drab and carried big black bibles. They stank and didn’t use perfume. Their message was holiness. The rapture was urgently imminent, and this world was well, worldly.
If we saw you with gold rings or a flashy car, we knew you were going to hell. Nowadays you gonna need those to make heaven.
In those days, we, I included, used words like “carnal”, and “of the flesh”. Our favorite scriptures were “don’t be unequally yoked with unbelievers”, and “holiness! without which no man shall see the LORD.”
See those capitals? If you dared write Lord with small letters, you could feel the first fires of hell coming for your god forsaken soul.
Don’t get it twisted. I was a church leader myself. If it could be done, I’ve done it. Gemme a t-shirt already.
These days, I’d say it like Lil Nas X (um, the Xth disciple?) ...”Can Nobody Tell Me Nuthiiiiin!”
Anyway. Digressed �
I’m just sayin. I was on my way to becoming one of these Forbes type private jet flying MOGs you rant about now, until life arrested me.
On my way to faith, fame & fortune, I was hit in the face with a light that unblinded me. Think Saul-of-Tarsus, with a twist.
That story, another day.
But in the 90s, something happened that made religion as necessary as the air we breathe.
Nigerians were smacked down brutally by a trio of dictatorial military regimes: Buhari, Babangida, Abacha.
Buhari forced us in line, one brutal decree after the other, one harsh horse whip and the next, and a War Against Intelligence, (or was it, Indiscipline?) until everybody walked on eggshells.
Babangida bamboozled us with a dazzling smile while crashing our livelihoods from one Naira for 2 US dollars to one-Naira-can’t-buy-you-shit. When last did you even see one Naira? It was under “IBB” that the union of academic staff coined the phrase “my take home pay can’t take me home”. Nigerians were throughly SAPPED, those who could exile exiled, the rest, gave their lives to Christ and started praying for prosperity.
Abacha.
Oh my god.
I mean. Oh.my.fucking.god
Phew.
Beast mode.
This man brought an entire fucking planet to its knees.
His killing machine sniffed you out, then snuffed you out.
This man had the UN Secretary General, the US Secretary of State, the worlds Islamic leader, and the goddamn Catholic Pope, flying in to Nigeria, basically getting down on their knees, begging him please.
The muthafucker said no. Didn’t budge.
If you look up Bad Guy in the dictionary, Abacha’s face is there.
How did Nigerians survive the swift transition from swimming-in-oil-money-giant-of-africa to austerity-inflation-SAP-no jobs-poverty capital?
We were literally crippled with fear.
We prayed hard.
Those evangelical crusades and prayer cities? That’s where they came from.
I was in many of those. We had one prayer point - God please get rid of Abacha.
And just as Nigeria was dangling from the precipice of the Last Dictator, the Man Died.
Phew.
That was close.
So close, we haven’t recovered.
Nigeria is still a militarized place. Just look at people’s Zombie-like mindsets, when they are confronted by SARS, and everything else happening day to day. We’ve never quite unlearned being submissive.
It was in those desperate years of death, drudgery and despair, that Nigeria learnt religion.
Look at us today?
We actually export the stuff.
A lot has changed tho.
It’s no longer for the dirty, smelly SU types: being religious is now cool.
There is no higher social capital, no stronger currency, no form of interaction or exchange more acceptable in modern Nigeria, than affirming your religious identity.
But we weren’t always this hardcore.
We were superstitious, but also carefree.
We are not carefree anymore.
We are afraid.
And without fear, not a single soul can be converted to an evangelical type religion, whether Christianity or Islam.
I’ll tell you that (personal) story another day, but the question I wanted to stir is:
“What if,
Instead of
A Religious Revolution
in the 80s-90s,
Nigeria had instead,
Undergone
an Ideological,
Intellectual
& Industrial
Cultural Sea-Change?”

�
What if?
In that alternate universe
the 80s & 90s had been an epoch of rigorous public debate, boundless inquisitiveness, fearless research, soul searching conversations, led by unsentimental public intellectuals and professionals academics, and the media,
What if ...
In that alternative universe
all that heady hubris and ideological dust raising led to an industrial revolution, and became the foundation for a homegrown map to a future we all want...
WHERE WOULD NIGERIA BE NOW?
Oh lord. �
But we didn’t have that 80s-90s.
Instead we had the one where everybody overdosed on unfounded ideas and unquestioned thinking, and where the public ethos was palpable, unbridled, raw, animalistic, existential FEAR.
Today, we greet one another “Happy New Month”
You know where that came from?
Fear.
The fear of not knowing tomorrow. Or next month.
So if you made it one more month, happy for you.
And it’s a real fear, cos people are dropping dead like flies here.
Hope you understand that Nigeria’s high mortality rates are man made? preventable? unnecessary?
Ok.
In the decades that 100s of millions of some of the black race’s finest potentials were dousing their thinking inside inflammable religious ideas, China was having a different kind of revolution. So were Malaysia and Indonesia. But China is a strong example not just for the results we see today, but because they were very meticulous and deliberate in that period. They literally shut the world out, wrote everything they wanted down, pushed aggressively and fully intended the outcomes the world sees today.
Ya ya ya.
I understand that having religion is not always such a bad thing.
But I also know that if you throw it, like a lit matchstick, into a young nation, barely mature from its independence, with no strong foundations in education, still struggling to provide basic needs, what you get is a toxic mix of magical ideas among people who’ve never known better.
Desperate people grasp at the endless hope religion promises, like drowning men to a fragile straw.
I understand that Nigeria has lost entire generations to our unpreparedness for the future. Today, professors of science are heading churches, and university students are gathering in huddles to pray against forces of darkness.
It doesn’t strike you as odd, these prayer circles on campuses, until you extract yourself from your normative experience and question what it is universities are designed to do.
But we missed two decades. We have missed a transition. We have wasted an entire generation or two.
Nigeria did nothing useful, between the 80s and 90s, and everything we almost did in the years after independence, has been degraded by now.
Today, even the youngest young people, in their teens, are already plotting their imaginations on the axes of religious, and futile ideas. It is a dangerous situation Nigeria is sitting on.
We will have to start from scratch.
The world has moved on, and left us in the lurch.
We are still struggling to solve 80s & 90s problems. We haven’t even received the question paper for the current exam.
I promise you catch up is not an option.
We need to entirely resit this JAMB. The questions have changed! Nothing we were taught in the 80s and 90s about development, currently applies. Do we even know that?
In closing.
This post is not about religion.
Though it refers heavily to it.
It’s about the simple fact that in order to develop, a nation (or even a business) must have rigorous ideas, meticulous plans, a clear way of thinking, on which to base development.
Errbody who ever developed had that.
So, we won’t be startin nothin.
We should have had ours too.
A good time to have been ready for today would have been 20 - 30 years ago.
But we missed that boat.
And now, in this carry over, we first have to unlearn all the nonsense we learnt in the 80s and 90s,
Then start learning how to think for now, and the future.
It’s gon be a lot of work.
Some might say, can’t be done.
I say, grind to a goddamn halt and accept we went down the wrong road.
That’s a very good place to start.