In the corridors of power, particularly in the Global South, to think of history is often to think of a museum. A place to visit for nostalgia, sentimental value, to mourn lost golden ages, or to borrow rhetoric for political rallies. This approach is a fatal error that undermines statecraft. History is not a museum filled with artefacts. It is a living laboratory. It is a dataset of cause and effect, a repository of successfully solved problems and catastrophic failures. A comprehensive summation of who we are as a people
The distinction between a politician and a statesman often lies in their use of history. The politician uses history to evoke a feeling of the good old days and secure votes. The statesman uses history to dissect the mechanics of past successes and apply them to future governance. Nostalgia is an anchor that keeps a nation trapped in the past while strategy, rooted in historical analysis, is a compass that guides national survival. To lead the future, we must rigorously audit the past.
As we look towards the future of governance in our country, we must see beyond the culture of commemoration. We must stop worshipping the Founding Fathers and start analysing their spreadsheets. The objective of this essay is to frame history as a strategic tool for state capacity, distinguishing between the sedative of memory and the stimulant of analysis. To lead the future, we must ruthlessly audit the past.
The Mechanics of Continuity
Institutions are not built in a vacuum. They are the crystallized responses to historical pressures. When we look at successful nations, we see that they did not erase their history to modernize. Instead, they repurposed it.
Consider the Meiji Restoration in Japan. The modernization of Japan was not a rejection of its feudal past but a translation of it. The Meiji reformers took the intense loyalty and hierarchical discipline of the Samurai class and dismantled the feudal structure, only to immediately reassemble those cultural traits into the modern bureaucracy and the Zaibatsu (industrial conglomerates). They did not say the Samurai are obsolete. They said, the Samurai spirit is a resource. How then do we direct it towards industrialization rather than internal warfare?
Similarly, South Korea under Park Chung-hee did not just copy Western capitalism and paste it in their society. They analyzed their colonial history under Japan and the devastation of the Korean War. They understood that their survival depended on rapid industrialization directed by the state. They adopted the Chaebol model, a massive, family-run conglomerate supported by the government, which was a direct strategic translation of historical communal structures into corporate behemoths like Samsung and Hyundai. They used their history of existential threat to drive a uniquely aggressive economic policy.
Perhaps the most potent example of translating historical vulnerability into strategic strength is Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. Upon separation from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore’s most glaring vulnerability was water. It was completely dependent on water agreements with Malaysia. This historical dependency was a noose around the nation’s neck.. This was because at any moment, Malaysia could and occasionally threatened to turn off the tap.
A nostalgic leader might have spent decades begging or negotiating better treaties. A strategic leader, however, viewed this dependency as an intolerable risk to sovereignty. Lee Kuan Yew and his successors initiated the Four Taps strategy: imported water (the legacy), local catchment (urban planning), desalinated water (technology), and finally, NEWater(reclaimed water).The genius lies in the NEWater initiative. Singapore did not just build treatment plants; they heavily invested in R&D to create high-grade reclaimed water.They turned their sewage which was a liability into a strategic asset. Today, Singapore is no longer a water-stressed victim. It is a hydro-hub, exporting filtration technology to the world. The lesson for Nigeria is clear: We must identify our water. Is it our refined fuel dependency? The strategy is not just to solve the shortage, but to over-engineer the solution until the solution itself becomes an exportable commodity.
Where We Lost the Thread
Contrast these Asian successes with the Nigerian experience. We often speak of the Golden Era of the 1960s. The groundnut pyramids of the North, the cocoa wealth of the West, the palm oil of the East. We adore this era with nostalgia. However, we rarely analyze the institutional mechanics that made it possible. We remember the wealth, but we forget the rigorous tax collection systems, the effective local government administration, and the disciplined civil service that made it a success.
If we are to diagnose the pathology of the Nigerian state, specifically its inability to execute long-term plans, we must pinpoint the exact moment the psychological contract between the state and its servants was broken. That moment was the Great Purge of 1975 under General Murtala Muhammed.
Prior to 1975, the Nigerian Civil Service, modeled on the British Whitehall tradition, was an institution of prestige. To be a Permanent Secretary was to hold a tenure that outlasted governments. This tenure provided the state with institutional memory, an ability to recall why a policy failed in 1960 so it wouldn’t be repeated in 1970.
However, the 1975 purge, executed with immediate effect, saw over 10,000 public officials dismissed without due process. While the stated intent was to cleanse the system of dead woods, the strategic result was catastrophic. It destroyed job security. The rational response of the surviving civil servants was to shift their primary focus from public service to private accumulation. Realising that the state could discard them at a whim, civil servants began stealing not necessarily out of greed, but out of fear, to build a safety net that the pension system could no longer guarantee. The files began to disappear, and data was weaponized for leverage.
A forward looking strategy for 2026 cannot simply be fighting corruption with arrests. That is a reactive measure. We must rebuild Bureaucratic Prestige. We must institute a Fast-Track Stream for the Civil Service. It must be a highly competitive, well-remunerated cadre for top university graduates, insulated from political appointments. Until the servant trusts the master, the master’s strategy will never be executed.
The Economics of Peace
As Nigeria confronts the post-conflict reality of the North East and the simmering instability in other regions, we must choose between two historical models of post-crisis management: The American Reconstruction (1865-1877) and the European Marshall Plan (1948).
After the American Civil War, the victorious North occupied the South but failed to economically integrate it. The strategy was largely punitive or indifferent. There was no massive infusion of capital to rebuild the shattered agrarian economy. Instead, the South was left to fester in a cycle of sharecropping, poverty, and resentment. Because the underlying economic engine was not rebuilt, the region remained the poorest part of America for a century. The peace was signed, but the prosperity was withheld. This vacuum allowed for the rise of insurgency groups and solidified a cultural divide that plagues the US to this day.
Contrast this with 1948 Europe. The United States, having learned from the disaster of post-WWI Versailles (which punished Germany into Nazism), chose a different path. The Marshall Plan which made them look like Father Christmas and Big Brother was not the case. It was a strategic investment. The US poured billions into rebuilding European industry. Crucially, they forced trade integration. They understood that a prosperous Germany was a better neighbor than a destitute one. The strategy was to flood the zone with liquidity and bind the former enemies together through supply chains.
Nigeria stands at this exact fork in the road regarding the North East. We can choose the Reconstruction Path, treating the North East with pity, sending trucks of rice and building temporary IDP camps. This creates a permanent underclass and ensures the ideology of insurgency will return. Or, we can choose the Marshall Plan Path.
We must treat the North East as a frontier market. We designate Maiduguri and its environs as tax-free Special Economic Zones. We invest heavily in solar energy by leveraging the region’s sun and trans-Sahelian trade logistics. We must stop reconstructing mud huts and start constructing a new economic engine. If we do not integrate the North East into the modern Nigerian economy through heavy capital investment, we are simply financing the next insurgency. Peace is both the absence of gunfire and presence of commerce.
The 2026 Imperative
How do we apply these lessons today? How do we translate the successes of the past into the initiatives of the future without falling into the trap of nostalgia?
- Food Systems
To understand why Nigeria is hungry in 2026, we must ruthlessly audit why we failed to feed ourselves in 1976 and 1980. The tragedy of Nigerian agriculture is not a lack of soil fertility; it is a lack of institutional memory. We have spent fifty years repeating the same strategic error: confusing agricultural campaigns with food system architecture.
In 1976, Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) relied on the mobilization of students and civil servants. These are people with no agronomic expertise. It was farming by sentiment.” In 1980, the Green Revolution flooded the market with fertilizer but ignored soil mapping and midstream processing. The result? We subsidized production but ignored the market.
The Legal Bottleneck: If we are to be serious about a 2026 strategy, we must confront the elephant in the room: The Land Use Act of 1978. This decree, born of a military command-and-control mindset, created the dead capital phenomenon. Because obtaining a Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) is a bureaucratic nightmare, the vast majority of Nigerian farmers sit on land they cannot use as collateral. You cannot build a modern agricultural sector on feudal land laws.
The Industrial Symbiosis Model: A forward strategy involves transitioning from Agriculture to Agro-Industrialization. Nostalgia tells us to look at the groundnut pyramids of Kano. Strategy tells us to look at the industrial zones of Vietnam. The future of Nigerian food security lies in Special Agro-Processing Zones (SAPZs). We must stop transporting raw tomatoes from the North to the South (losing 40% to spoilage). Instead, we must locate the processing plant at the farm gate. For the South West Development Commission, the strategy is not to compete with the North on grains, but to dominate the protein and processing value chain, leveraging the Lagos ports to export processed food. Not raw commodities.
- The Awolowo Model for the Digital Age
Chief Obafemi Awolowo is revered for his investment in human capital. But the strategy wasn’t just spending money. It was linking a productive asset (agriculture) directly to a social outcome (education).
- Nostalgia: Let’s bring back the Marketing Boards.” (This fails because the global economy has changed).
- Strategy: Let’s link our current productive assets (Technology, Entertainment, Gas) to social funding.
We must replicate the linkage, and not necessarily the specific commodity. A modern application would be ring-fencing tax revenues from the Digital Economy or Solid Minerals specifically for specialized technical education, creating a closed-loop funding system similar to the Cocoa-Education link of the 1950s.
- The Lagos State Blueprint (1999-Present)
A positive Nigerian example of translating history into strategy is the trajectory of Lagos State since 1999. Faced with a hostile Federal Government that seized its funds, the administration looked at history and realized waiting for Abuja was a death sentence. They reverted to the pre-oil principle of Internally Generated Revenue (IGR).
They modernized tax collection to get money and build political autonomy. This was a strategic application of a historical truth: He who pays the piper calls the tune. By securing fiscal independence, Lagos secured political stability. This is a lesson for every state in Nigeria today. Autonomy is not necessarily given but purchased with fiscal discipline.
Conclusion
The mandate for the next generation of leadership is clear. We are inheriting a world of volatility. Climate change, geopolitical fragmentation, and domestic resource constraints. In this storm, history is our radar.
We must look at the Oyo Empire, not to wear its robes, but to understand how it managed logistics and trade routes across West Africa. We must look at the failures of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), not to bitter ourselves, but to understand the dynamics of currency devaluation and local production.
Legacy should inform strategy. It should provide the data points for our risk assessments and the blueprints for our institutions. But we must remain ruthless in our application. If a historical tradition does not serve the strategic imperative of the future, it must be archived, and not necessarily enacted.
True leadership is the ability to drive forward while checking the rearview mirror. Not to stare at it, but to ensure that what is coming from behind does not overtake us. We must be students of the past, so we can be masters of the future.
