There is a Nigeria we were handed — and a Nigeria we keep reaching for.

The one we were handed does not wait for you to be ready. It meets you the moment you gain admission into a federal university — that letter of hope, that first triumph — and begins, quietly, to dismantle everything you believed about the future. You arrive on campus with dreams packed into a Ghana-must-go bag, and within weeks, reality starts unpacking itself around you.

You know this Nigeria in the pit of your stomach when ASUU calls a strike — again. A four-year programme becomes five, then six. You watch mates who chose private universities graduate and begin living while you are still waiting — waiting for lecturers to return, for the government to care, for someone in Abuja to remember that your time is not infinite. Your parents did not budget for this. But this is the Nigeria we know: where the academic calendar bends to politics, and students are the ones who break.

Then there is the infrastructure — or the ghost of it. Hostels where six share a room built for two. Lecture theatres holding a thousand in a space built for three hundred. Libraries stocked with books from 1987. Laboratories with equipment that hasn’t worked since before you were born. You improvise. You adapt. You learn in spite of it all — because the hunger to learn is the one thing this system hasn’t managed to kill.

Money is its own war. Bursary payments that never arrive on time. Parents sending what they can from salaries the naira has already halved. You eat once a day and call it discipline. You ration data like medicine. And there is fear, too — the fear that walks with you at night on campuses where streetlights haven’t worked in years, the whispered warnings about cultism, the quiet anxiety of female students who know that some lecturers treat grades as currency and dignity as negotiable.

But nothing captures the Nigeria we know more brutally than what happened recently at Obafemi Awolowo University. A 400-level medical student — someone who spent years learning how to save lives — died on campus. And when the ambulance came, it arrived without a stretcher, without oxygen. An ambulance! Empty of the very things that define it.

He came to study medicine. He imagined the lives he would one day save. And this country could not give him a stretcher. That ambulance is the perfect symbol of the Nigeria we know — the appearance of function where there is only form, the performance of care where there is only absence.

And then there is the insult that follows the injury. Imagine training as an optometry student — spending millions of naira out of your own pocket to purchase the equipment and instruments required just to learn your profession. Slit lamps, ophthalmoscopes, trial lens sets and much more. Millions! Sacrificed by parents who skipped meals, took loans and swallowed their pride. You survive the strikes, the hostels, the darkness, the fear — you qualify — and Nigeria turns around and offers you ₦200,000 a month. Two hundred thousand naira. After millions spent. After years lost. After everything.

What exactly are you supposed to do with that? What rent does it pay? What debt does it clear? What future does it build? The message is clear, even if nobody says it aloud: your sacrifice was noted. It just was not valued.

And yet — we must still speak of the Nigeria we dream of. Not to bury these realities under false hope, but because silence changes nothing and grief alone builds nothing.

The Nigeria we dream of is one where no student dies from a preventable emergency. Where an optometry graduate does not have to choose between staying and starving or leaving and thriving. Where what you invest in your education is honoured — not mocked — by what you are offered in return. Where the ambulance comes fully equipped. That Nigeria is not a fantasy. It is a decision — one that leaders keep refusing to make, and that ordinary Nigerians keep demanding with their voices, their votes and their pain.

Every student who survives this system is making an argument — that Nigeria’s young people are stronger than its failures, more determined than its dysfunction, more worthy than its neglect.

We owe it to those we have lost — and to ourselves — to make sure these stories are not just mourned, but remembered as the moment we decided that enough was enough.

One day, this country will be worthy of the people it has been failing. Until then — we study. We speak. We do not forget.