There comes a time in the life of a people when the hymns of hope must give way to the music of mourning, not because the people are gone, but because they live as though gone, staggering in a twilight where survival masquerades as life. This is the dirge for the living: a funeral song sung not to close the grave but to pry open the conscience.
Nigeria sixty years and counting since it tore itself free from colonial guardianship remains a giant only in jokes and self-delusion. It strides the African stage with borrowed robes, puffed with crude oil fumes, yet limps from one crisis into the next. It boasts of youth but carries the decay of an old drunkard who refuses to sober up. Every attempt at progress becomes a rehearsal for regression. Three steps forward, five backward, then a drunken pirouette that leaves the nation precisely where it began, if not worse.
What makes this tragedy unbearable is not just the missteps, but the ritualization of missteps into permanent choreography. In Nigeria, mistakes are not corrected; they are naturalized, domesticated, dressed in the garments of policy, and taught as tradition. Corruption is no longer scandal; it is curriculum. Division is not an accident; it is statecraft. Mediocrity is not failure; it is standard operating procedure. A people who can no longer blush at disgrace are already half-buried.
The Paradox of Singing One’s Own Funeral
In most cultures, the dirge comes after the body stiffens. It consoles the living, not the dead. But here is the paradox: Nigeria’s body politic is still breathing, though shallowly. To sing her dirge now is not to bury her but to force her to hear what her children will soon say over her corpse. There is a peculiar violence in being made to attend one’s own funeral. The words sting differently when you are not ashes but flesh.
Other nations, too, stand in this twilight; Ghana wrestling with debt traps, South Africa crumbling under the weight of corruption, Congo still chained to the ghost of plunder. But Nigeria is perhaps the loudest cautionary tale, the laboratory where Africa experiments with endless postponement of destiny.
So let us sing the dirge loudly enough that Nigeria hears and in hearing, maybe protests her burial. And let those who watch from Dakar, Nairobi, and Johannesburg listen too, for this dirge is continental.
The Anatomy of the Drunken Stumble
Picture a drunk man walking home. At intervals, he straightens, even quickens his pace, and neighbors cheer that he might finally reach the door. But then, without warning, he stumbles backward, lands in the gutter, and laughs. This is Nigeria since independence.
- The 1960s offered the promise of democratic stability; instead came coups, countercoups, and a civil war that bled a million souls. The scars remain, unhealed, unexamined, festering beneath every call to “unity.”
- The oil boom of the 1970s should have been the foundation of industrial renaissance. Instead, it became the curse of rentier politics. The state forgot how to produce and learned only how to distribute and steal.
- The 1980s and 1990s brought structural adjustment and military autocracy. Nigerians learned to shrink dreams, to treat survival as triumph.
- The return to democracy in 1999 was greeted as sunrise, but turned out to be a recycling of old actors in new costumes. Elections became auctions; governance became the privatization of public trust.
Every decade had its chance to reset. Every decade ended by deepening the rut. The lessons from each stumble were not merely ignored; they were embalmed as habits.
The Disease of Institutionalized Failure
Here lies the dirge’s refrain: in Nigeria, failure is not punished, it is promoted. A minister caught looting reappears as senator; a disgraced governor rebrands as elder statesman. In this land, the river does not only carry filth; it dignifies the filth as sacred water.
Consider education. Universities, once citadels of intellectual fire, now produce graduates who stumble through syntax and arithmetic. Yet every government celebrates “youth empowerment,” as though certificates without competence were currency. Consider power supply: billions poured into electricity reforms, yet citizens still worship generators like household gods. The darkness itself has been normalized; children grow up thinking electricity is an occasional miracle, not a right.
It is this normalization that makes Nigeria’s case lethal. Corruption, division, incompetence these exist everywhere. But in Nigeria, they have been woven into the national DNA, so much so that to challenge them is to appear abnormal. The drunkard is not ashamed of his stumbling; he is proud of his stamina in never collapsing completely.
Why the Dirge, and Why Now?
Because time has expired. Nations that began the race with Nigeria such as Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea are already in another century of progress. They leapt from poverty to prosperity while Nigeria rehearsed its next excuse. To tell Nigeria “you still have time” is to indulge delusion. The dirge is the only honest music left.
And there is power in the dirge. Anthropologists tell us that in some traditions, laments sung before death helped the dying person let go or conversely, provoked them to resist death fiercely. That is the hope here: to confront Nigeria with the sound of its own funeral, so that it either surrenders to oblivion or rebels into life. Anything less is sentimental theater.
The Cost of Denial
Consider this: the Nigerian middle class is migrating en masse, doctors and engineers fleeing to Canada, the UK, Australia. The poor, left behind, endure banditry, unemployment, collapsed schools. The leaders? They send their children abroad while governing a homeland they do not intend to inhabit. If this is not death, what is?
Yet in the midst of this collapse, Nigerians dance, joke, create memes. Resilience, they call it. But resilience, stripped of strategy, is simply denial wearing bright colors. You can laugh your way to the grave, but the grave still yawns.
A Continental Warning
Nigeria’s dirge must echo beyond its borders. For what plagues Nigeria is not uniquely Nigerian: it is African. The addiction to resource rents, the ease with which leaders recycle failure, the readiness of citizens to normalize mediocrity all these are shared pathologies. Nigeria is merely the magnifying glass through which the continent can see its own reflection.
If Africa listens carefully, Nigeria is both mirror and warning. The dirge sung for Nigeria today may be sung for Kenya tomorrow, for South Africa the next day. No nation is immune where failure is ritualized.
The Dirge as Weapon of Shame
Shame, when rightly applied, is not cruelty. It is medicine. Nations rise not when they feel good about themselves, but when they are stung by the unbearable contrast between what they are and what they could be. The United States, for all its contradictions, was propelled by the shame of segregation exposed under global scrutiny. Germany rebuilt itself after the shame of Nazism forced it into a generational reckoning. Japan, stripped bare after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, turned humiliation into discipline.
But Nigeria resists shame. It wears disgrace like a second skin. A government official caught with dollars stuffed in his bedroom insists he was keeping it for “prayer.” Legislators filmed fighting in parliament are celebrated like wrestlers in a circus. Instead of outrage, there is laughter, memes, resignation. A people too numb to shame are impervious to reform. Only a dirge public mourning for a nation still breathing might pierce that numbness.
Imagine this: across the land, citizens gather not for independence celebrations, but for mock funerals of the republic. Coffins draped in green-white-green paraded through streets, not in rebellion but in lament. Obituaries printed not for individuals but for institutions Here lies the Nigerian Judiciary, 1960–2025: died of corruption and compromise.” Such theater may sound extreme, but remember: when logic fails, symbolism becomes the last medicine.
Transforming Mourning into Defiance
Yet a dirge is not only about grief. Among the Plains Indians, warriors sang their death songs before battle, not because they wished to die but because they refused to die afraid. The dirge, sung prematurely, became a declaration of courage: “I have faced death already; therefore, I am free to fight without fear.”
This is what Nigeria and nations like it must learn. The dirge is not the final word. It is the preface to resistance. To hear your funeral rehearsed while you still breathe is to be forced into a choice: lie still and confirm the burial, or rise and fight to rewrite the ending.
Nigeria’s youth, restless in their digital villages, have already shown flashes of this defiance. The #EndSARS protests of 2020 were not merely political demands; they were a refusal to be buried alive by a decrepit system. The state responded with bullets and silence, but the dirge had been sung, and it lingers still. The question is whether this dirge will grow into a chorus that refuses to be silenced.
The Danger of Eternal Rehearsal
But here is the danger: a people can become addicted to dirges. They can sing their own funeral endlessly without ever choosing life. Africa must beware this trap. It is not enough to name decay; it must be confronted. Otherwise the dirge becomes another form of entertainment, like the jokes Nigerians crack while queuing for fuel in an oil-rich land.
This is the paradox to guard against: the dirge that awakens versus the dirge that anesthetizes. The line between them is thin. One pushes a people into rebellion against death; the other lulls them into accepting it as fate. The task of writers, thinkers, leaders, citizens is to ensure the dirge cuts like a blade, not comforts like a lullaby.
A Call to Other Nations
Nigeria is not alone in this twilight. Consider:
- South Africa, liberated from apartheid, now strangled by corruption, power cuts, and inequality so vast it mocks the very promise of freedom.
- Kenya, a hub of innovation, still trapped in cycles of election violence and elite capture.
- Ghana, once hailed as a model of stability, staggering under debt and disillusionment.
- Congo, so rich in minerals that the world courts it, yet so broken in governance that its people remain among the poorest.
Each of these nations is alive, but in danger of living as if dead. Each risks becoming a body that moves, speaks, even celebrates yet whose soul is buried under layers of failed promises.
The dirge for the living, then, is not uniquely Nigerian. It is African. It is the song that must echo from Cape Town to Cairo, warning that independence without accountability is illusion, that sovereignty without self-respect is mockery.
Lessons from the World Beyond
To understand the urgency, compare Africa’s stumbling with the brutal clarity of nations that refused to indulge failure. South Korea, in the 1960s, was as poor as Ghana. Today it exports technology to the world while Ghana imports even toothpicks. Singapore, a swamp of malaria in 1965, now a global financial hub. The difference is not luck but discipline, not resources but refusal to normalize failure.
Meanwhile, Nigeria, with oil wealth that dwarfed theirs, invested not in infrastructure but in patronage. The wealth of the future was squandered on the luxuries of the present. Leaders flew private jets while hospitals decayed. The dirge we sing today is the bill for decades of feasting.
The Dirge as Continental Mirror
When sung loudly enough, Nigeria’s dirge becomes a mirror in which all Africa must see itself. The mirror does not lie: it shows the wrinkles, the sores, the wasted years. The temptation is to smash the mirror, to accuse the dirge-singer of pessimism, of betrayal. But denial will not erase the rot.
The dirge says: Look at yourself as you are, not as you wish to appear.
The dirge says: History has no patience for latecomers.
The dirge says: Your children will not inherit excuses; they will inherit ruins unless you rise.
The Rebellion We Must Choose
What, then, must be done? The answer is not another vision statement, not another anti-corruption agency, not another donor-funded program. These have been tried, and they have failed. What remains is rebellion not necessarily of guns, but of spirit.
A rebellion where citizens refuse to normalize incompetence. Where teachers strike not for salaries alone but for dignity in education. Where professionals refuse to lend their expertise to corrupt regimes. Where artists, writers, musicians flood the air with dirges so relentless that silence becomes impossible. Where shame is restored as a weapon, and mediocrity is no longer excused as “African time.”
This rebellion will be uncomfortable. It will provoke backlash. But no nation has ever risen without first passing through fire. The dirge must burn before it heals.
Closing the Circle
Let us return to the drunkard stumbling home. He is cheered, pitied, excused until one day he stumbles into traffic and is crushed. Nigeria, Africa, cannot afford that ending. The dirge for the living is sung now so that the living may protest their burial.
This is not a song of despair but of confrontation. It mourns, yes, but it mourns to awaken. It names the grave not to leap into it, but to remind the living that the grave is already dug, and the only way out is to refuse burial.
So let Nigeria hear her dirge. Let Africa hear it too. And let the nations, in defiance, rise and say: Do not bury us yet.
Dr. Charles Obiajulu Ugwu writes from Lagos
