I have found myself of late thinking of Nigeria as a painting—a specific painting, in fact: Diego Rivera’s The Flower Carrier. There is something familiar about the boldness of this painting: the vividness of the colors, the unevenness of the characters portrayed in it—the female larger than the male, who is smaller than the basket of flowers he is carrying, the weight of which has kept him on his knees. The simplicity of the painting and the complexity of its many interpretations is an apt metaphor for my beautiful homeland and its hardworking people: It’s the image of a strong person being crushed by the weight of beautiful things.

The question of what is wrong with Nigeria—why a country so blessed with so many talented people and so many natural resources that far more advanced countries can only dream of—has preoccupied generations of thinkers, political analysts and academics. It has also greatly exercised the minds of market women in Saminaka as they sit chanting their wares in the Sahel sun. So, too, the conductor who croons out his various bus stops as the Atlantic licks the shores of Lagos, and the cluster of men around the vendors’ table who debate this subject in our dramatic fashion, loudly and in the colorful language riddled with jokes, curses and proverbs that is typical of Nigeria. Heated as these debates are, they often end in agreement and a resigned, hopeless sigh. Debates these people will have again the next day, like somnolent characters trapped in a recurrent nightmare.

It is the same sense one gets reading Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria, nearly 40 years after its first publication in 1983. The same issues, first laid out in the book, resonate today, draw the same nods of agreement and the same sense of despair one gets at the end of these engagements around the vendor’s table.

Achebe’s 68-page booklet, born out of prompting by his publishers, tries and largely succeeds in highlighting some of the major issues troubling his native Nigeria. Achebe touches on some key issues hampering Nigeria’s development, which are sadly still true today: failure of leadership, tribalism, false self-image, lack of discipline, social justice and a cult of mediocrity, as well as corruption. His writing is simple and anecdotal, with examples that highlight the essence of his thesis. Years later, this slim book has remained relevant to the understanding of Nigeria and its many problems for both Nigerians and foreigners.

Where Achebe mentions names and dates, one needs only to insert names of contemporary politicians and this generation’s political parties, and they would fit perfectly. For people unfamiliar with the nation’s history—and there are many Nigerians in this category—there will be the shock of realizing that these same things have been happening all along, that if you take newspapers from 1983 and interchange their pages with those from 2019, you would find that they form a cohesive unit. In some cases, some of the actors from the past—like the current president, Muhammadu Buhari, head of state from 1983 to 1985 following a military coup, then voted in as president in 2015 and 2019—are still active today as part of the endless procession to bury our optimism for this country.

If there is a point of divergence from Achebe’s booklet, it would be in the assertive statement that opens the book. “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character.”

This is a powerful statement and has, since the book’s publication, become a mantra for critics of the system. The trouble with this statement is simply and squarely, to borrow the old master’s phraseology, that it exonerates Nigerians from our complicity in the consistent violations of the country and from our failure to protect her. Most crucial of all, it excuses us for condoning leaders such as the ones we have had for generations.

If, at the end of the quadrennial “hunger games” we call elections here, we consistently reelect the same leaders who have failed us, and accept this with a meekness that we cannot practice during road rages, then I think Achebe might have had a rethink.

To his credit, Achebe wrote of the cargo cult mentality: the notion that, in his words, “a belief by backward people that someday, without any exertion whatsoever on their own part, a fairy ship will dock in their harbour laden with every goody they have always dreamed of possessing.”

This notion, a certain sense of entitlement even, may be connected to the “high destiny” idea incompetent political orators have sold to Nigerians of a greatness that was, in reality, a prospect and had not yet been achieved. This attitude has imbued Nigerians with the sense that something—someone—other than themselves would come, wave a wand and change the situation.

Perhaps this was best demonstrated in 1998, when military strongman General Sani Abacha was at the height of his powers. As we are increasingly fond of doing, Nigerians prayed for “divine intervention.” Providence teased us with the sudden deaths of the dictator and the “president-elect” M.K.O. Abiola, whom he had jailed. A chance for a fresh start, one would say. But because we were unprepared for the intervention we had been waiting for, we had no idea what to do with it when it fell on our lap. Again, we unwittingly entrusted our fates to dictators, who stripped off their military uniforms and continued the mismanagement they had started in the 1960s.

These are mistakes we have repeated over the years, rewarding undeserving politicians with second terms in office because on the eve of elections, they distributed bags of rice and sachets of sugar to electorates they had starved for the previous four years. Where these cheap entreaties fail, the power of the muzzle in the hands of political thugs and partisan security personnel suffices, as in the recent elections in Kogi State.

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When Achebe interrogated the fallacy of the ideals of Unity and Faith emblazoned on the Nigerian coat of arms, he did so in a way that showed up the floating nature of these ideals that every Nigerian is expected to adopt.

Of faith in particular, the author said, “faith is all right provided it is to be placed on something acceptable. It cannot be good in itself. Before we are persuaded to have faith we must first ascertain the nature and worth of the receiver of our faith. We must ask the crucial question: Faith in what? just as in the matter of unity we must ask: Unity to what end?”

The drifting nature of this faith required of Nigerians and the failures of governments over the years have led to Nigerians attaching their abundant faith to religion and religiosity.

Perhaps if he had waited a few more years, Achebe would have seen the spark of faith fever, first stirring in the late ’70s, growing into a conflagration. Sadly, this development has not made Nigerians conscientious, it has made us arguably the most religious country in the world and possibly the least godly, where faith leaders endorse corruption and exploit their gullible devotees, and public servants at government ministries spend more time praying than working.

Perhaps Achebe would have devoted more space to talking about how religion has been used as a weapon to further abuse the over-exploited Nigerians and how they have, out of desperation, submitted themselves to this abuse. Politicians know that religion is the corrupting mumu button of most Nigerians and that all they need to do is push that button.

In 2009, Bode George, a leading politician, was convicted of looting ₦85 billion (US $230 million) from the Nigerian Ports Authority, which he headed. After a two-year jail term, he was released from prison and driven to a church in Lagos for a flamboyant, nationally televised “thanksgiving” ceremony attended by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, several state governors, leading public figures and thousands of supporters. Priests spoke glowingly of this man, who wasted no time promising to lead the ruling party’s onslaught in the next elections.

Religious revivalism took root when desperate people turned to faith merchants to provide the hope that had been robbed from them by years of misrule. Today, if a morally bankrupt person with no recognizable competence wishes to stand for election, all they need to do is bankroll a few places of worship, appear at religious events and make the oft-repeated claim that “God directed” them to run. That candidate would be a shoo-in for the job.

The people, who have been sold this dummy for years, are not without blame for the state of their country. The people carry the flowers of faith on their backs, the weight of which crushes them.

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Like the flower carrier in Rivera’s painting, the Nigerian is weighed down on all fours by the basket of promise and potential his country holds. If one imagines this carrier struggling to rise with his burden, like an image on a loop, soundtracked by Enya’s Less Than a Pearl, the repetitive and heartbreaking nature of our reality manifests.

Even in this imagery, the Nigerian in me wonders if this carrier realizes that the flowers (insert power here) he carries off to be sold and planted in the houses of the rich and mighty, the politicians, to be gifted to their favorites and paramours, would be best entrusted elsewhere. What if he decided to invest these flowers in his own house and gardens?

What all this means is that the fundamental trouble with Nigeria is a mindset that needs changing, not only by a few or some elites, but by the collective—to agree that true power belongs to them, that they are more united in misery than the immaterial differences in tribe and religion foisted on them. What if they said “enough of this nonsense” and actually meant it?

As for Achebe’s booklet, it remains as accurate today as it was all those years ago when it was published. That, in itself, is a monumental tragedy.