A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
~ Greek Proverb
Every generation of Nigerians has had its moment of justified rage. Ours is no different, and our rage is no less legitimate than those that came before. We have marched. We have tweeted. We have held candles in the dark and written the names of the dead on placards and lifted our voices in the streets until the streets themselves seemed to answer. These are not small things. Protest is the grammar of a people who refuse silence, and a generation that will not be silenced is a generation that has not yet surrendered. That much must be said, and said without qualification.
But grammar is not structure. And what Nigeria requires of this generation is not only the courage to name what is broken. It is the longer, quieter, less celebrated courage to build what must replace it. It is what every generation that has loved a country more than it loved its own comfort has ultimately been required to give.
The distinction matters because protest and commitment to building a formidable nation, though they often share the same moral energy, are not the same act. Protest is reactive by nature. It responds to what exists, names it as intolerable, and demands its removal. It is necessary. It is noble. It is also, by itself, incomplete. A country is not built by the removal of bad things. It is built by the construction of good ones as a replacement by the slow, unglamorous accumulation of institutions, habits, and civic agreements that make collective life possible and dignified. No constitution ever wrote itself in the streets. No hospital ever rose from a hashtag. No school curriculum was ever reformed by outrage alone. Between the demand and the delivery stands the hard, structural work that only organised, committed, and patient citizens can perform.
Nigeria’s deepest problem is not a deficit of anger. It is a deficit of builders. We are in dire need of men and women willing to enter the unglamorous rooms where institutions are made and unmade, to serve on the school board that nobody else will join, to stand for the local government seat that nobody else will contest, to start the cooperative that organises the market women, to train the civil servants who will outlast every political administration, to document the community’s land boundaries before the developer arrives with a court order and a politician’s backing. They will earn no trending hashtag. But they are the acts upon which every durable society in history has been built. And their absence in Nigeria is the wound beneath all the other wounds.
Consider what it means to bequeath a nation. The generation of Nigerians born between 1930 and 1960 bequeathed us a country whose founding institutions, the University of Ibadan, the Western Region’s free education programme, and the groundwork of a federal civil service, were built by people who would not live to see their full flowering. Chief Obafemi Awolowo did not build schools because he expected to benefit from every graduate they produced. He built them because he understood something that our generation is in danger of forgetting. The purpose of institutional building is not the reward of the builder. It is the inheritance of those who come after. The question every generation must eventually answer is not what the nation gave them. It is what they gave the nation when they had the chance.
What, then, does active citizenship look like beyond the placard? It looks like a lawyer who takes on the pro bono case that holds a local government accountable for a diverted constituency fund, knowing the case may take five years and yield no personal gain. It looks like a young engineer who returns from abroad not because Nigeria is easy but because Nigeria is where the work is. It looks like a community association that maintains the road the government neglected, not out of resignation to state failure but out of the understanding that the commons will not maintain itself. It looks like a teacher who stays and resists the seduction of departure and remains in the classroom where the next generation is being formed, knowing that what is deposited there will compound in ways no economist can fully model. Citizenship, at this level, is a vocation.
The children who will inherit Nigeria are not yet born. Some of them are in primary school. Some are in the arms of their mothers in Benue, Buguma, Bauchi, Bori and Badagry, looking out at a country whose future they cannot yet name but whose character is being determined, right now, by the choices their parents and grandparents and older siblings are making about whether to engage or to withdraw, whether to build or to bemoan, whether to plant trees whose shade they may never sit under. Those children have no vote in this. They cannot march. They cannot protest. They can only receive what we decide to leave them.
That is the weight this generation carries. Not the weight of guilt as guilt is a private emotion and a public indulgence. It is the weight of obligation. Very specific, non-transferable obligation of a people who know what is broken and possess, if they choose to use it, the capacity to begin the repair. History will not ask whether we were angry. It will ask whether our anger was converted into anything that outlasted us. It will ask whether, when we had the floor, we used it to build or only to speak.
A nation of repute is built on accumulation. Decision by decision, institution by institution, generation by generation, by citizens who understood that the country they wanted for their children would not arrive as a gift from a government or a saviour or a turn of political fortune. It would arrive, if it arrived at all, because enough people in enough rooms over enough years chose the harder work of construction over the easier work of complaint.
That choice is available to us now, in this moment, with these hands. The question is whether we will make it and whether, when our children ask what we did with the Nigeria we inherited, we will have an answer that is worthy of the question.