A Letter to Nigeria at 66

Dear Nigeria,

I write as your son and as someone who has spent much of his working life building businesses and systems. That work has taught me that talent and effort need something solid beneath them. People need reliable power, clear rules, access to markets, and a fair chance to finance good ideas.

We should speak honestly about the reforms underway. Removing the fuel subsidy and changing the exchange-rate system have been painful, but they have also begun to correct distortions and restore investor interest. Some capital is returning to the market, including to government debt and infrastructure.

That progress matters. But investor interest is not yet prosperity for ordinary Nigerians. When families still struggle with the cost of food, transport, and power, reform has not finished its work. We must turn a more credible investment environment into businesses, jobs, and lower costs people can actually feel.

I do not believe another round of palliatives is the answer. They have too often been temporary, poorly targeted, or disconnected from the reasons life is so expensive. The lasting answer is to make it easier and cheaper to produce, move, and sell what Nigerians need. That means dependable power, better links between farms and markets, storage that prevents food from going to waste, and rules that do not change without warning.

We must also fast-track the systems that make credible lending possible. Many Nigerian businesses have customers and a real ability to repay, but lenders cannot easily verify their identity, income, transactions, assets, or contracts. I have seen this up close. Running an agent network, I watched traders repay more reliably than many salaried borrowers, yet no lender could confirm who they were or what they earned. Their record lived in a notebook, where no lender could trust it. That evidence needs to live in reliable business and credit records. Land and other collateral should be easier to verify, and commercial disputes faster to resolve. When lenders can see and trust the evidence, more businesses can borrow to grow, hire, and produce.

Prosperity also rests on values. Keeping our word, respecting honest work, and treating public resources as a shared trust are not nostalgia. They are what make a market work. We rebuild them when our homes, businesses, and institutions practice them, and when our systems reward integrity.

Nigeria is not one economy repeated across every state. Each state has its own strengths and obstacles. We must look beyond the limitations we have learned to accept and examine the structure that keeps producing them. What can people build in each place? What prevents it from reaching customers? What expertise and investment would remove that barrier?

That work requires qualified people from across many fields, including energy, agriculture, finance, logistics, law, public health, education, and technology. Government should invite capable Nigerians to serve even when they have no interest in party politics. Let them be chosen for their competence, given clear mandates, and allowed to do the work without being turned into political props or punished for partisan reasons. Elected leaders must set direction, but expertise must have room to serve.

At sixty-six, we should measure reform by what changes in daily life. Can a business keep its doors open and pay its workers? Can food get from farm to market at a reasonable cost? Can a promising company borrow on the strength of its records and its customers? Can people trust that the rules will still be there tomorrow?

Our people have already shown that they can build. The country’s task is to make that building less difficult and more rewarding, so that effort turns into income, and income turns into a better life.

Happy Independence Day, Nigeria.

Your son,
Tolu Adetuyi