The National Anthem We Sing And The Nation We Live -By Joel Praise

A national anthem is supposed to bind us. Sung at school assemblies, football matches, and state functions, it is a public vow set to music. Ours promises brotherhood despite tribe and tongue, truth and justice, a banner without stain, and a land where no man is oppressed. Those are not small promises. The question is whether we still mean them.

We still sing the words. Students stand at attention every Monday. Athletes place hands on chests before matches. Leaders mouth the lines at inaugurations. But outside the ceremony, the lyrics often sound like a report from another country. We sing “in brotherhood we stand” while communities in Plateau and Benue bury victims of attacks that pit neighbor against neighbor. We sing “truth and justice reign” while the trial of kidnappers arrested after the Kuriga school abduction in Kaduna in March 2024 drags with little public update. We sing “to hand on to our children a banner without stain” while UNICEF reported that more than 1,680 school children were abducted in Nigeria between 2014 and 2024, and many schools in the North West still close whenever bandits are sighted.

The stain on the banner is not abstract. It is the empty desk in LEA Primary School, Kuriga, where 137 children were taken last year and later freed after weeks in the forest. It is the fear that makes parents in Zamfara keep daughters at home on market days. It is the choice many graduates make to seek visas instead of jobs, because “peace and plenty” feels like a line for other people. When the anthem says “no man is oppressed,” it is hard to reconcile that with families paying ransom to free relatives, or with communities that only see security forces after an attack, not before.

This gap between lyric and life did not start with one government. Cult clashes on campuses predate this administration. Highway banditry grew through multiple tenures. That history matters, because it tells us the problem is systemic, not seasonal. Yet history is not an excuse. Every government that swears to protect the constitution also inherits the anthem. If the words are renewed each term, the responsibility is renewed too.

Still, the anthem is not dead. It shows up in places the cameras miss. In May 2025, residents of a village in Sokoto organized night patrols and contributed fuel for the local police van after a bandit threat, and the attack never came. In Lagos, a secondary school principal in Agege stopped a fight between students from different ethnic groups by making them recite the “though tribe and tongue may differ” line and then share a bench for a week. They ended up on the same debate team. In Abuja, a group of corps members under the NELFUND scheme used part of their stipend to buy textbooks for a displaced children’s camp in Kuje. None of these make headlines, but they are citizens acting like the anthem is a set of instructions, not a song.

So the problem is not that we have the wrong anthem. The problem is that too many of us treat it as ceremonial. Leaders cannot sing “justice reign” and then ignore audit reports on security spending. Students cannot sing “brotherhood” and then exclude a classmate for their surname. Citizens cannot sing “banner without stain” and then pay bribes to avoid queues or share kidnapping videos for clout. The anthem is a mirror. If we do not like the reflection, we change our faces, not the mirror.

The difficult questions remain. Are we united enough to demand accountability across party and region? Are we honest enough to admit when our own side fails? Are we willing to build the nation line by line, act by act, rather than wait for a government to hand it to us?

When we sing next Monday at assembly, the test is not volume. The test is whether the child next to you feels safer because of what you did last week. Did you report the senior who bullies juniors? Did you refuse to forward the unverified voice note that said bandits were in your area? Did you pick merit over tribe when choosing a team captain? A banner without stain starts with those choices.

Nations are not rebuilt by perfect leaders alone. They are rebuilt when ordinary people decide the words they sing are not poetry but policy. Let hope arise, yes, but let it arise because we are doing the work that makes hope reasonable. Nigeria can still become the nation we sing about, if we decide the anthem is a to-do list.