2018 Tutu Fellow Oluseun Onigbinde has launched his debut book The Existential Questions: Uncomfortable facts confronting Nigeria after a 60-year journey. Nigeria's 60th anniversary took place in October 2020. He asks the question 'why has the country failed to live up to its potential', and his answers lie within the 285-page softcover.
Oluseun looks at where his country is and how it got there by examining Nigerian leadership, the country's socio-economic status, its weak legal and judicial systems, and other human development systems and arrives at the conclusion that Nigeria has been grossly mismanaged. But he doesn't stop there.
The book also undertakes an analysis of how this gross mismanagement, short-termism, lack of national values, and polarising tribalism and nepotism have severely held back the country.
Oluseun says he asks these questions not to be negative, but in the hope that Nigerian leaders will be provoked to rethink the country's trajectory. Perhaps, he says, they'll ask 'how did the rain start beating us?' In their asking, he hopes they'll find solutions.
Oluseun is the Lead Partner and co-founder of BudgIT, a civic organization that has been working since 2011 to make public finance data more accessible, transparent, and understandable to citizens. The work his organisation is undertaking seeks to empower every citizen in Nigeria with equal access to information about the fiscal position of their society so that they can ask useful questions about how taxpayer money is being spent.
The Existential Questions is available on Amazon. The book was published in June 2021.
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