Nigeria at 66: Looking Back, Looking Forward        

Fellow Nigerians, today, we mark the sixty-sixth anniversary of our independence. It ought to be a day of celebration and thanksgiving to God Almighty for the gift of life and for the immense blessings He has bestowed on our nation— our diversity, our abundant human and natural resources, our vast agricultural potential, and the relative absence of devastating natural disasters.

It should also be a day of appreciation and patriotism: a day to remember our founding fathers and all those who made selfless, and in many cases supreme, sacrifices for the birth, survival and growth of our dear nation. We must acknowledge the efforts of past and present leaders who have laboured, however imperfectly, to build a better Nigeria.

Yet independence anniversaries must never be reduced to mere celebration. They are moments for honest national reflection. We must look back, examine where we stand today, and ask ourselves whether we are moving in the direction our founding fathers envisioned.

In national planning and strategy, every serious nation must continually ask three fundamental questions:

Where are we today?

Where do we want to be?

How do we get from where we are to where we want to be?

These questions are especially urgent now. Despite the enormous promises made by the APC-led government in 2023, our nation continues to face deepening challenges across virtually every critical sector of national life.

Today we stand before the world as a nation: With an extraordinarily large population living in poverty and severe hardship; over 140M With one of the largest populations of out-of-school children in the world; over 18M Where insecurity, terrorism, banditry and kidnapping continue to threaten lives and livelihoods, just recently 37 young Nigerians in their productive age lost their lives

Where millions of Nigerians struggle with hunger and food insecurity; over 40M Nigerians will be extreme hunger by the end of 2026.