Good morning, and happy Independence Day.
We launched The Morning Report on July 1, which means this newsletter is exactly three months old today. In that time, we have covered the collapse of parts of the grid, the President's return from Paris, the death of Olu Jacobs, the Falconets in Poland, the Hisbah in Kano, the SBM jollof index, and the 11 generators that vanished from a compound in Lagos. We started in the rainy season, and we are still here in it. So is Nigeria.
What have we learned in 90 days? That a country can hold grief and glory in the same hand. In that time, 37 suspected illegal miners died in NSCDC custody in Niger State, packed into a cell until they could not breathe, and 20 officers were suspended. Nursing students in Jalingo protested after hoodlums raided their hostel and raped a colleague, the second attack in two weeks. Aisha Buhari was filmed on a yacht in Spain while families in Surulere counted what ₦70,000 could no longer buy. A crash on Kara Bridge paralysed the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway for a day and reminded us that one overturned container can halt a nation's commerce. NIHSA warned 15 states to prepare for severe riverine flooding. And in the same season, our troops rescued 66 kidnapped citizens and cleared IEDs across multiple operations, quietly doing the work that never trends. That is Nigeria. The horror and the rescue, often in the same week.
We have also watched the political class rehearse its next act. 31 APC governors are resisting Nyesom Wike’s parallel campaign structure, because nothing unites a ruling party like the question of who controls the machine. Polling shows the President’s net favourability swinging on fuel costs and inflation, which is a polite way of saying the price of petrol is now a political variable. The CPPE has asked the government to review expatriate quotas and business permits to protect small Nigerian traders from being swallowed whole. And in Kaduna, the state began enrolling Almajiri pupils into integrated Qur’anic and Tsangaya boarding schools, an imperfect, complicated, necessary attempt to give thousands of boys an education that does not force them to choose between the mosque and the classroom. We have covered all of it, and we will keep covering it.
Here is the thing about independence at 66. We are not celebrating a country that has arrived. We are celebrating one that is still trying. The grid still collapses. The naira is still finding its floor. Hospitals are still understaffed, and roads are still unfinished. But the soldiers still go out. The teachers still show up. The traders still open their stalls at dawn. The nurses still do their rounds. The young woman in Kano still sells akara to pay her brother’s fees. The country works, in the small hours and the small places, because ordinary people refuse to let it stop.
So happy Independence Day to you, reader. You have carried this country through another year of bad news and quiet courage, and you have let us into your morning for the last three months. We do not know what the next season holds, but we know this: there is no other country we would rather report on, and there are no other people we would rather write for. We have no choice but to hope, because despair is a luxury we cannot afford. And hope, in Nigeria, is not naivety. It is a discipline.
May the rains fall gently. May the lights come on. May the roads hold.
Warmly,
Lolade