Dear Conquered Generation,
I write this with a familiar grief, the kind that settles over you when you look at a thing of immense beauty and realize it is being dismantled from within. We became a conquered generation the moment tribe became more important than our shared nation. It wasn’t because our heritages are inherently evil; diversity should have been our poetry, our profound strength. Instead, we failed to build an identity large enough to shelter all of us, leaving us shivering in the small, defensive corners of our divisions.
It begins quietly, almost politely, at dining tables and in whispered offices. Instead of asking, ‘Who possesses the mind and the hands to build this place?’ we lean in and ask the small, fearful question: ‘Is he one of us?’
When I look back at how we reached this point, a hot, sharp anger flares beneath the sorrow. We watched our country fragment into a series of bitter, transactional negotiations over identity. We stood by as public appointments became tribal trophies, celebrated with regional banners as if a ministry were a conquered territory rather than a public burden. We let merit become a dirty word, something to be viewed with suspicion. And the deepest shame of our collective conscience is this: we became a people who would look at blatant, ruinous incompetence and defend it, simply because the person sitting in the ruins shared our dialect.
How did we become so numb that we traded collective progress for the hollow satisfaction of a tribal victory?
There was a time when policies like federal character were born from a genuine, historical fear of domination, a noble attempt to ensure no region felt permanently discarded or marginalized. But somewhere along the line, that noble intent was warped. Representation stopped meaning ‘everyone deserves a fair opportunity to rise,’ and began to mean ‘it is our turn to sit at the table, whether we are prepared to lead or not.’ We watched institutions stop selecting for excellence and begin selecting for political comfort. And as competence became secondary, a slow, structural rot set in.
The irony is a cruel, agonizing thing. Every ethnic group eventually suffers from the very same broken systems they once defended for a passing, short-term tribal advantage.
We tried to build private walls against a public collapse, but reality is an unyielding judge. The pothole that swallows a tire does not care about your accent. The inflation that empties a mother’s cooking pot does not recognize tribe. The unemployment that breaks a young graduate’s spirit does not check their surname. Institutional collapse is entirely democratic; it eventually humbles and punishes everyone.
It takes an immense psychological and emotional effort to see beyond our immediate identity without erasing the beauty of where we come from. A person should be fiercely, beautifully proud to be Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Ijaw, Tiv, Efik, Ibibio, Fulani, or any of our magnificent heritages, yet still possess the moral clarity to know that our shared nation deserves fairness and functioning systems above tribal spoils.
Our deepest wound is not that we love our ethnic roots too much; it is that we no longer trust the nation to treat us equally. We retreat into the tribe's sanctuary because the state has failed to convince us that it belongs to all of us fairly. It is a survival instinct born of abandonment.
But we cannot stay hidden in those small sanctuaries forever. The challenge before our generation is heavier than politics; it is an act of collective imagination. We must summon the determination to design a form of belonging in which choosing competence is no longer branded as a tribal betrayal and in which the collective's actual progress matters more than the symbolic possession of an office.
There is a quiet, stubborn hope rising beneath this exhaustion. It is the realization that no society can survive when public institutions are treated as ethnic spoils. We are tired of measuring our survival by how much our specific group can take; we should be ready to measure our destiny by how much we can build together.