“THIS IS A wonderful day, and it is all the more wonderful because we have awaited it with increasing impatience, compelled to watch one country after another overtaking us on the road when we had so nearly reached our goal.” It might have been Mr Buhari speaking at his inauguration on May 29th, a colourful ceremony attended by more than 20 heads of state.
In fact, the speaker was another Nigerian leader at an equally hopeful event, the country’s independence celebrations in October 1960, which Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the first prime minister, hailed as Nigeria’s “great day”. Yet little over five years later a military coup set off a slide towards bloody civil war. Ever since then, every time Nigeria seemed to be getting close to fulfilling its enormous potential, it suffered yet another crushing disappointment. Various civilian governments elected amid great optimism soon degenerated into instruments of patronage and graft. They, in turn, were overthrown by military dictators promising to root out corruption and restore Nigeria to greatness. Yet the generals, too, soon discovered a taste for the good life and found that greasing the right palms...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1H150Ne
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