The Generation That Inherited a Country and Left a Ruin, by Kator Ifyalem

There is a particular kind of grief reserved for what could have been. Nigerians who came of age in the 1960s and 70s inherited something rare, a currency that held its value against the dollar, a public education system that fed its children real meals, universities that produced graduates the world respected, and a civil service where competence, not connection, still mostly decided who rose. They were, in the truest sense, the beneficiaries of a functioning state, one built hastily after independence, yes, but still functioning. What they did with that inheritance is the question history will not let Nigeria avoid.

By the time many of them reached their thirties, they were already sitting atop institutions, ministries, parastatals, universities, boardrooms, often astonishingly young by today’s standards. A civil servant in his late twenties could hold a directorate position. A lecturer in his early thirties could be a head of department. This was the natural result of a small, still-forming elite moving quickly into the vacancies left by departing colonial administrators. They had opportunity handed to them at a pace no generation since has matched.

Rather than build systems that would keep producing capable successors, many of that generation built moats around their own positions. Recruitment that was previously merit-driven became a family affair, nephews, in-laws, hometown associates, and political loyalists filling roles that should have gone to the most qualified applicant. Contracts that were previously awarded on capacity were awarded on kinship and kickback. The collapse of the naira from parity with the dollar to its present depths did not happen by accident; it happened through decades of policy choices, mismanaged oil windfalls, and institutional capture by people who had no intention of relinquishing the advantages they had inherited so easily.

And then they stayed. Long after their peers in comparable economies had ceded ground to younger technocrats, the gerontocracy in Nigeria dug in. They remained in the Senate, in traditional institutions, in the boardrooms of banks and oil companies, in the leadership of political parties that in 2026 are still steered by men who were already powerful in the 1980s. A country with one of the youngest populations on earth is still, disproportionately, governed by people who remember analogue telephones as cutting-edge technology.

This is not an argument that every Nigerian in their sixties, seventies, or eighties is complicit. Millions of that generation lived honestly, built nothing but their own households, and suffered the consequences of the very mismanagement described here as pensions delayed, savings devalued, healthcare unaffordable in the country they helped build. The critique is not of an age but of a governing class, the ones who held the levers and chose entrenchment over renewal, nepotism over meritocracy, personal accumulation over national development.

What makes the story sting is the counterfactual. Nigeria did not lack the human capital or the natural wealth to become a middle-income power by the 1990s. It lacked the discipline of a leadership class willing to build institutions bigger than themselves. Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia, these nations started the post-colonial race with far less but were led by figures who, whatever their flaws, understood succession, technocracy, and long-term institution building as the price of legitimacy. The elite of that era in Nigeria largely did not.

The consequence is a country now run, in large part, by the children and grandchildren of that failure. Young Nigerians are now locked out of the very meritocratic pathways their parents and grandparents walked through easily, competing instead in an economy hollowed out by decades of extraction, and inheriting institutions deliberately weakened to protect incumbents. The irony is severe because the generation that got the best start Nigeria ever gave anyone left the worst platform Nigeria has ever handed its children.

If there is a lesson in this reckoning, it is not bitterness for its own sake. It is a warning to every generation that follows, that proximity to opportunity is not the same as stewardship of it. The next chapter in Nigeria will be written by whichever generation finally understands the difference, and has the discipline to act on it before the moat closes around them too.