As a child growing up in Nnewi, Anambra State, in the 1970s and 80s, it is shocking to remember that we had some facilities that are not available in Nigeria of today. In the 1970s, Nnewi was a semi-urban town. It was not reckoned with as a town of significance. In fact, maps produced in the 60s and 70s intentionally omitted Nnewi because it was seen as non-strategic. In most maps that listed South-Eastern towns and cities, one could see Onitsha, Enugu, Aba, Awka, Owerri, Mbaise, Afikpo, Igbo-Ukwu, Okigwe, Orlu, Abakaliki, Nsukka, Oguta, etc, but Nnewi was usually not listed.
The reason was that there was nothing special about Nnewi until the Nigerian crisis erupted in 1966, which led to the establishment of the Nkwo Nnewi Market for returnees to transact their business while the crisis raged. Even though Nnewi had some big business men before the war, they were based in Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt, Aba, Enugu etc. None was based in Nnewi because Nnewi was seen more as a “village.” After the Nigerian War ended in 1970, the market continued to operate and grew to become the centre of attraction.
Nnewi was so insignificant and non-strategic that there was no direct bus between Nnewi and Enugu, the then capital of old Anambra State. There was also no direct bus to Nsukka, the only South-East town with a university until July 1980 when Jim Nwobodo established Anambra State University of Science and Technology as Nigeria’s first state-government-owned university. To get to Enugu or Nsukka and most bigger cities, one had to first take a bus to Onitsha.
Nnewi had no library. Public electricity and telephone system came in the 1980s. There was no stadium in Nnewi, no radio or TV station, no cinema, no theatre, no zoo, no recreational centre. Only one paved road ran through Nnewi, which we called Main Road.
However, despite all that, there was public water supply right inside my father’s compound. Any time water ran through the tap, we filled our tanks, drums, jerrycans, buckets, etc. Our neighbours also came in to fill theirs, since not everyone had the resources to pay to have the public water.
The post office worked effectively. The streets were not named and numbered. But those who had the wherewithal had their personal boxes where letters were delivered. Those who couldn’t afford to own a post office box used the address of their church or school.
In addition, along the tarred road, houses were built at a specified distance from the road, wide enough for a mini bus to park facing the road. In some areas, the setback beside the road was wide enough for two sedan cars to park bumper to bumper facing the road. By the inner roads, despite not being paved, the set-back beside the road was up to six feet or more.
In a Facebook post last week, my friend and university mate, Kelechi Deca, looked at the issue. He said inter alia:
“In a phone discussion with a friend, he said that I tend to either contradict myself, I asked how. He reminded me of saying that “Nigeria is advancing and at the same time under-developing.” I told him that using generators to charge his iPhone15 ProMax and Tesla is a good example. He cut the line.
“It is unfortunate that most Nigerians, irrespective of their levels of education and exposure, still lack basic understanding of human development.
“That is the problem of having the structure without the infra. Classic human underdevelopment. Every human advancement must have an existing ancillary platform that enables its operations in a seamless manner. The platform, in most cases, is socio-cultural or intellectual. That is the infra.
“Every negative development statistic in the world, we are among top 10; that’s underdevelopment.
“You drive a N300m 2023 Range Rover, or a N400m Mercedes Benz G-Wagon. Yet the road leading to your house is pothole-infested. And boys are stealing manhole covers everywhere. One jump into a manhole at high speed would wreck the multimillion naira one-in-town car. Advancement without development.
“You live in a multi-billion exclusive estate, but still pay millions extra to estate security and association for basic things such as road maintenance and internal security. You know that you can be deleted from the face of the earth and nobody would see a trace of you till thy kingdom come.
“A country where 122.5 million of the population have access to the Internet, yet over 45 million defecate in the open. That is underdevelopment pro-max. Have you wondered why motorists give way to the sirens of politicians but would not yield to ambulances? It is because we are primitive people.
“If you check the budget of the 36 states of the federation and the FCT, in the last decade, you’d be shocked to note that not up to 10 per cent of the states had any plan for potable water. To them, almost every household provides its own water through boreholes, so there is no need for pipe-borne water.
“In some villages, during Christmas, you’d see some people using luxury cars to fetch water. They do not see the irony because they do not know better. Absence of potable water is a sign of primitivity in a society. It is also a huge pointer to the sanitation levels within a given country. It is not for nothing that cities are planned with a central sewage system. Visit any home in Nigeria, ask them where their septic tank is located, and ask where their borehole is located. Do the maths. London built the first central sewage system in 1858. But 165 years later, we can’t even handle our own shit.
“In my village, we had pipe-borne water supply before the Biafra War, and it was resuscitated after the war. But since the last 20 years, sinking a borehole has become the order of the day for every family, including mine. The water facility has been abandoned. Remember Iju Water Works? It was a world-class water treatment facility engineered by the Japanese.
“When I was growing up, within my rural locality in Mbaise, as at mid 80’s, we had about 40 secondary schools, and all of them had boarding facilities. Among these secondary schools were about 10 older ones, each had a football field, a basketball court, a tennis court, a volleyball court, fully equipped science laboratory, clinic, library, and staff quarters, etc. About 30 years later, it would be a miracle to see any with functioning facilities. That’s underdevelopment. And it is nationwide.”
There was a time Nigeria’s naira was stronger than the United States’ dollar and the United Kingdom’s pound sterling. A brochure advert of the 1978 tennis singles final of the Lagos Lawn Tennis Club trended recently. The final match was between Kjell Johansson and Robyn Drysdale. The prize money was $13,100 or N10,220. Today, one US dollar exchanges for over N1,100.
That same period, countries from other parts of Africa as well as Asia and even Europe sent their officials and citizens to Nigerian university teaching hospitals for treatment, because of their quality. Today, Nigerian leaders and most citizens who can afford it travel to other countries for medical treatment. In addition to medical treatment, students from other countries used to come to Nigerian universities to study. Lecturers also came. Some Nigerians who had admission offers from American universities and Nigerian universities chose Nigerian universities because Nigerian universities were rated higher than many American universities. Today, Nigerian students flood all countries of the world for university education.
In addition to public water supply, there was a time when electricity supply was reliable. There was a time when train travel was reliable. Decades later when virtually all homes should have been connected to the public water supply, wells and personally sunk boreholes are being used by each home. At a time when each home should have been connected to the national grid for constant supply of electricity, each home and business banks on generators and lamps.
There is something that marks out countries that are developing from those that are retrogressing. That thing is the fact that their present is better than their past.
However, any time Nigerians talk about the past, they do so with nostalgia, because the past of Nigeria is always better than the present. That is a bad omen. Progress and development mean improvement. The Oxford Dictionary defines the verb “progress” as: “Advance or develop towards a better, more complete, or more modern state.” Any country whose past seems better than the present is neither developing nor progressing but retrogressing. Over the past four decades, Nigeria has been regressing in a heartbreaking way because of wrong actions, and that should worry those who lead the country at all levels.
Credit: Azuka Onwuka