Every time I drive past the old Federal Secretariat in Ikoyi, my heart sinks.

The building is still imposing, but now it is dilapidated, disused, almost ghostly. It was once the engine room of a young nation. For me, it is deeply personal. 

In July 1981, I walked into that complex as a fresh Administrative Officer Grade VIII in the Federal Ministry of Aviation. I was 23, full of ideals. But I stayed only three months.

My dream was to be a career diplomat. I wanted it so badly. Yet, I lacked the faith my classmates had. The FEDERAL CHARACTER PRINCIPLE, in the 1979 Constitution unsettled me. I feared the system would not see merit. 

 

I went to Ife for a Master’s in International Relations and, by providence, began as an Assistant Lecturer in the Government Department at the then Oyo State College of Arts and Science, Ile-Ife. That detour shaped my life.

So when I see that crumbling Secretariat, I see more than bricks and broken windows. I see my own youth. I see ambition interrupted. I see a nation’s great starts and slow stalls.

Perhaps that building is a mirror. We are brilliant at building. We are poor at sustaining. We raise monuments but struggle to maintain institutions. We inaugurate with fanfare but forget to fund maintenance. We birth dreams but lack the faith to nurture them through storms.

Yet I refuse to end in sadness.

Because the same Ikoyi that holds that ruin also holds my story of redirection. I did not become an ambassador, but I became a teacher of future leaders. I did not serve in foreign missions, but I founded a school for indigent, rural children in Oke-Ila Orangun.

So maybe the urgent work is not just to repair that Secretariat. The urgent work is to repair our attitude to legacy. To believe again. To maintain what we build. To teach our young ones that faith, not fear, must guide ambition.

Let that old building not just remind us of decay. Let it call us to resolve.

For a nation, like a man, is not defined by where it started, but by what it chooses to sustain.

MAY THE GOOD LORD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA.

Written by Kabiyesi Oba Adedokun Omoniyi Abolarin.