Nigeria: The Giant That Lost Its Soul
Written by: Comrade Barry Chukwunyem Nordi Anuchi.
When salt loses its saltiness, it becomes worthless, trampled underfoot, and forgotten. Once hailed as the Giant of Africa, Nigeria has lost the moral essence that once made her the hope of a continent. A nation blessed with brilliance, oil, and boundless potential has become synonymous with corruption, failure, and bloodshed. The tragedy of Nigeria today is not merely economic. It is moral, spiritual, and existential.
When the World Gave Its Verdict
Over the years, global leaders have not hidden their disappointment in what Nigeria has become. In 2018, during a closed-door discussion in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron reportedly described Nigeria as “not a country, but a cemetery.” His remark reflected the grim reality of mass killings, kidnappings, and unchecked violence ravaging the land.
Two years earlier on May 10, 2016, Britain’s then Prime Minister David Cameron was caught on camera telling Queen Elizabeth II that “Nigeria and Afghanistan are possibly the two most fantastically corrupt countries in the world.”
During a 2018 Oval Office meeting with U.S. lawmakers on 11 January, then-President Donald J. Trump infamously referred to Nigeria as a “shithole country.” By November 1st, 2025, he branded it “a disgraced nation,” lamenting the bloodshed and persecution of Christians while accusing Nigeria’s leaders of shielding Islamic extremists
Each insult was a wound but also a mirror. These remarks, painful as they are, expose the world’s deep disillusionment with a country that seems to have surrendered its dignity and direction.
Nigeria, with its vast wealth, fertile land, and vibrant population, has allowed greed, tribalism, and moral compromise to drag it into a pit of its own making.
A Nation Where Terror Is Rewarded
Few realities capture Nigeria’s moral collapse more painfully than its bizarre compassion toward terrorists.
In 2014, the world watched in horror as Boko Haram militants stormed the Government Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State, abducting over 300 schoolgirls. The government’s slow and helpless reaction exposed the depth of its dysfunction until the global outrage sparked by Michelle Obama’s #BringBackOurGirls campaign forced the world to intervene
A decade later, hundreds of those girls remain missing. Their parents still wait for answers that will never come.
Yet, instead of pursuing justice, the Nigerian Senate proposed a bill to grant foreign education scholarships to “repentant terrorists.” State funds were to be used to rehabilitate those whose hands were drenched in innocent blood. These killers were feted with white native attire, celebrated under banners of “de-radicalization,” while their victims’ families still mourn in forgotten IDP camps.
To call it tragic would be too kind; to call it madness would be closer to the truth.
When a nation begins to reward terror and punish integrity, its soul has truly died.
The Conduit of Corruption
At the heart of Nigeria’s decay lies an elite political class that treats governance as a business empire. Public office has become a platform for looting rather than service.
Nigerian politicians have perfected the use of conduit pipes channelled through Europe, the UK, and America to siphon billions of dollars in public funds. Money meant for schools, hospitals, and infrastructure ends up in private accounts abroad while millions at home wallow in poverty and deprivation.
Nigeria’s roads are death traps; hospitals are empty shells; schools are collapsing ruins. Yet, every election season, the same faces return recycling deceit and mediocrity. They fly their children abroad for education while public universities rot in endless strikes. They seek medical care in London and Dubai while ordinary citizens die in under-equipped hospitals.
This grotesque inequality has driven millions of Nigerian youths to desperation.
With little hope at home, they risk their lives across deserts and seas in search of greener pastures. Many perish in the Sahara or drown in the Mediterranean uncounted, unnamed, unmourned.
They flee not because they hate their country but because their country has betrayed them.
A Nation Without Justice
Nigeria is perhaps the only country on earth where farmers pay taxes to terrorists, where bandits appear on national television for “peace talks” while holding assault rifles, and where soldiers take photographs with insurgents instead of confronting them.
Government officials attend the weddings of known warlords; criminals dine with power while patriots languish in prison.
When citizens protest injustice, they are silenced, harassed, or jailed. Yet, murderers and looters walk free sometimes rewarded with political appointments or national honours.
The brutal murder of Deborah Samuel in 2022, a young Christian student at the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto, remains a haunting symbol of this moral collapse. Accused of blasphemy for merely asking classmates to stop posting religious messages, she was stoned and burned alive by a mob of extremists.
No justice followed. No convictions. Instead, a Muslim woman who publicly protested Deborah’s murder was sentenced to prison by a Sharia court.
In March 2025, the Supreme Court of Nigeria upheld the death sentence of Sunday Jackson, a Christian farmer from Adamawa State, who killed a Fulani herdsman, Ardo Bawuro, during a violent confrontation on his farm. Jackson claimed he acted in self-defence, explaining that the herdsman attacked him with a knife after invading his farmland. Though wounded in the struggle, he managed to disarm his attacker, and in the process, Bawuro was killed. Despite evidence suggesting he acted to protect his life, the court ruled that once Jackson had disarmed the herdsman, using lethal force became excessive. The judgment, delivered on 7 March 2025, affirmed his death sentence, shocking many who saw it as an erosion of justice.
The ruling drew widespread outrage from civil rights advocates and Christian organisations, including the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), which condemned the verdict as a travesty of justice. Critics argued that the case reflected a growing pattern of judicial bias against Christian farmers defending themselves from violent herdsmen. Analysts warned that the decision set a dangerous precedent that criminalizes self-defence and emboldens aggressors. As ThisDay newspaper observed, “When justice punishes the victim and vindicates aggression, a nation’s conscience stands condemned.”
In a democracy that claims to uphold equality, how can two laws one national, one religious govern a single nation? How can democracy coexist with a legal system that sanctifies murder in the name of faith?
This contradiction between constitutional law and Sharia lies at the heart of Nigeria’s dysfunction. It divides the country, institutionalizes persecution, and fuels extremist violence.
The Culture of Numbness
Somewhere along the line, Nigerians became desensitized to their own suffering.
Each massacre, scandal, and tragedy sparks momentary outrage and then silence.
The people have learned to say “it is well” even when nothing is well.
But it can not be well, not when millions of children roam the streets without education. Not when the poor sleep hungry while senators debate scholarships for terrorists. Not when those who steal are celebrated, and those who tell the truth are silenced.
This moral numbness is the quiet death of a nation’s conscience. It is how injustice becomes normal and how evil becomes culture.
The Giant of Africa, Now a Ghost of Itself
Sixty-five years after independence, Nigeria stands as a monument of squandered potential. A land blessed with oil, gold, and human talent has become a graveyard of broken dreams.
The same leaders who preach patriotism are the architects of the nation’s ruin. They speak of unity while sowing division, promise progress while enabling decay.
In international circles, Nigerians are treated with suspicion not because of racism but because of the corruption their leaders exported to the world. The honest Nigerian must now fight to prove innocence before even being trusted.
The world no longer mocks Nigeria out of hatred, but out of disbelief:
How can a nation so rich be so poor?
How can a people so gifted tolerate such rot?
How can a country that once inspired Africa sink so low into moral darkness?
A Nation at the Crossroads
History teaches that civilizations do not fall because of external enemies they collapse from within.
Nigeria does not need the world’s apology. It needs repentance.
Until truth returns to governance and justice returns to the courts, until leadership ceases to romanticize bloodshed in the name of reform, Nigeria will remain what the world already calls it a disgraced, decaying shadow of its promise.
The salt has lost its saltiness.
And unless Nigeria regains its moral taste unless conscience returns to power, this land, once called the Giant of Africa, will remain a graveyard of unfulfilled dreams and wasted destinies.
Epilogue: A Plea for the Soul of a Nation
Nigeria’s collapse is not inevitable. It is man-made and, thus, reversible. But that change can not come from those who profit from the chaos. It must come from a new generation willing to rebuild the moral foundations their fathers abandoned.
The world does not owe Nigeria an apology.
Nigeria owes itself redemption.
And until the nation rediscovers its conscience, justice, and courage, it will continue to bear the shameful names the world has called it “A Cemetery, A Shithole, A Fantastically Corrupt Country, and A Disgraced Nation”.
Because a nation that rewards terror, punishes honesty, and silences truth has indeed lost its soul.
