Dear Nigeria,
Yesterday we celebrated your birthday, the way we always do: with green-and-white outfits, loud music, and long arguments about whose jollof deserves the crown. It was the kind of day that reminds us how complicated our feelings for you are, and how simple the love underneath them is.
We won’t pretend we don’t know what you put us through. We know the traffic, the generators, the prices, and the days when “tomorrow will be better” takes real faith. We carry all of it, and we aren’t writing to deny it. But this issue is about the Nigeria we don’t see, the one that rarely makes the headline and has been quietly holding us together all along. So today we’re writing about that one.
We love your people. We love how strangers become family in a queue, a danfo or a wedding hall. We love the stranger who gives directions and then walks you there. We love a greeting that takes a full minute because nobody is in a hurry to skip the “how is your family?” We love your humour, which finds a joke in every inconvenience and a nickname for every situation. You have taught us that laughter is not the opposite of seriousness. It is how we get through.
We love how you taste. Your tables are bigger than the world knows. Everyone talks about jollof, suya, afang, amala and egusi, but we also love the tuwo with miyan kuka, the steaming ekuru with fried stew, the fisherman soup that tastes like the creek it came from, and the dishes our grandmothers made that we’re still trying to get right. Even the simplest meal here comes with an unspoken rule: you must eat before you go.
We love how you sound. Pidgin, proverbs, a hundred ways of saying “no wahala,” and over five hundred languages under one name. We can’t get by a day without answering a question with another question. The sarcasm is undeniable when asking “Hope nothing?”, knowing full well that there’s something wrong. Your music makes the whole world dance, and makes chores easier.
We love the places you hide. Figures carved from stone centuries ago still sit in Esie, and nobody can fully say who made them. Seven streams fall together at Agbokim. A river rises from the roots of a tree in Delta State. A plateau in Taraba stays cool all year, and most of us haven’t seen even half of this. We are tourists in our own country, and that may be the best news of all, because it means there is always more to discover.
Above all, we love the way you keep going. There is a trader opening her stall before sunrise, a teacher who stays late for one more student, a nurse working through another long shift, a young person building something out of almost nothing. They rarely make the news, but they make the country. Their effort is the quietest, truest proof of who you are.
So here is what we want you to know, Nigeria. We see you. Not just the version that trends or frustrates us, but the one that wakes up early, laughs loud, cooks with care, and keeps trying. We don’t love you because you’re easy. We love you because you’re ours, because you’re far more than your problems, and because every time we think we’ve seen all of you, you show us something new.
Here’s to the Nigeria we don’t see yet, and to the one we’ll build together.
With love, always.
