From open pavilion to nation of orderlies: Is Zik’s ‘fear-free’ Nigeria still possible?

.What a 1960 inauguration says about fear in today’s corridors of power

By Omeiza Ajayi

Nearly 66 years after Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was sworn in as Nigeria’s first African Governor-General, the footage of that day – which has again recently gone viral – raises an uncomfortable question: why did a leader who held the highest office in the land need no retinue of security details standing behind him, while today every minister, and even some local government supervisors, cannot move without a swarm of details?

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The inauguration took place on November 16, 1960, at Tafawa Balewa Square, barely six weeks after independence. It was also Zik’s 56th birthday.

The narrator of the newsreel set the scene plainly. “At the steps of the pavilion stand the Prime Minister and the Lord Chief Justice, symbolising the people and the law, on what is surely one of the most important occasions in the history of the country.” 

No armed escort looms in the frame. No aide hovers at the shoulder of the man the crowd was chanting for. “Zik! Zik!” rang around the square as he arrived, and the vast stands, in the narrator’s words, were “hushed.”

Today the picture is reversed. In Abuja and in the state capitals, orderlies trail ministers into halls and offices. The situation is so bad that some security personnel actually enter into very enclosed spaces or rooms with their AK47 rifles in clear breach of security protocol. At the local government level, some unelected supervisory councillors have been known to move with armed vigilance team members or hunters, sometimes to intimidate the very people they were appointed to serve.

The easy explanation is insecurity, and it is not a false flag. Banditry, kidnapping and insurgency have made parts of the country dangerous, and no leader can be faulted for fearing for his life.

But the leaders of other nations also face threats. Behind the American president or a British prime minister stand trained protective officers, assigned to a defined danger. They do not crowd every public official, from the cabinet room to the ward office, with men whose chief duty is to announce importance. It is not uncommon in Nigeria to see security details standing and blocking a television camera. 

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That leaves the harder question. Are Nigeria’s leaders afraid of the general state of the country, or have they become afraid of their own people?

Zik, standing in the open that November morning, appeared to have settled that question for himself. He began his address with these words: “It is with humility, mingled with joy, that I thank this grand concourse of patriots and friends of Nigeria for congregating here today on the occasion of my inauguration as the first African Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of the Federation of Nigeria.”

He titled the speech “Respect for Human Dignity,” and he made no secret of what he feared for Nigeria. It was not assassins. It was division. “I appeal to all our leaders, far and near, to forget the wounds which were inflicted in cause of our internecine altercations. The love of our country should outweigh the love of our petty selves”, he said. 

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 He named his rivals one by one, among them Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, and Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and invited them into what he called “this herculean task of national reconstruction.” A man who expects to be harmed by his rivals does not call them to his side before a crowd of thousands.

His vision was explicit. “Let us bind the nation’s wound, and let us heal the breaches of the past, so that in forging our nation, there shall emerge on this continent a hate-free, fear-free, and grief-free people.”

Fear-free was the promise. Sixty-six years on, the country has more roads, more universities and more money than that crowd could have imagined, yet fear now sits in the offices meant to dispel it. It sits with the minister who cannot cross a lobby unescorted, and with the local government chief who needs hunters to face his own community. It also sits with the citizen who cannot get near either of them. Nigeria’s innocence has long been defiled by rapists who sodomized her without protection. Today, we have a multitude of prostitue followership. The problem cuts both ways – a deceptive leadership and an ignorant followership. 

Much of what Zik said that day still holds. “Nigerians believe passionately in the fundamental human rights,” he declared, and he warned that “we must jealously guard our freedom with our lives, if need be.” The words read today less like history than like an assignment left unfinished

What has changed is the distance between the governed and those who govern. In 1960, the footage shows a leader and a people with nothing between them. In 2026, the orderly has become the thing between them, a badge of rank as much as a shield.

Whether Nigeria can return to the open pavilion depends on whether its leaders can once again be trusted by the people, and can trust them in return. Security is a necessity, but it cannot replace that trust.

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Zik believed the country could be “hate-free, fear-free, and grief-free.” The film of that November morning still plays, and it still asks of every leader who passes a crowd with armed men at his back: “The love of our country should outweigh the love of our petty selves.”