If Nigeria is to break this destructive cycle, we must transition from what Nietzsche termed “reactive” history to a critical history — a deliberate practice that scrutinises past structural failures, disarms historical grievances, and prioritises civic nation-building over score-settling… Until we stop using yesterday as a weapon to fight today’s political battles, we will remain trapped in Hegel’s grim reality: a nation that speaks of its history incessantly, yet learns absolutely nothing from it.
An excess of history makes life wither and degenerate – Nietzsche
During the recent presentation of the book, Emirs of Zazzau: A Biographical Study (1808–2025), in Zaria, Professor Usman Bugaje made a compelling case for the imperative of historical knowledge. He reminded the audience of the indispensable need to study history if we are to understand our present and navigate our future.
His call echoes a familiar refrain heard across our public space: we must study history so that we do not repeat it. Yet, as the contemporary state of our country so vividly demonstrates, this moral maxim is flawed in its popular execution. Do we truly learn from history in Nigeria? Or do we absorb the past merely to stock an arsenal of grievances, inciting new hatreds under the guise of remembrance?
When examined through the lens of political philosophy, Nigeria’s fraught relationship with its past reveals a tragic paradox: historical knowledge, rather than serving as a lamp for national building and institutional enlightenment, has too often been transformed into a flame for social division.
The Fallacy of the Lesson
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel made a stark observation that remains unnerving in its precision: “What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon principles deduced from it.”
Hegel’s insight was born, not out of structural critique of human governance. States rarely act out of wisdom derived from old textbooks. In Nigeria, this Hegelian paradox is visible in the cyclical nature of our political and economic crises. The structural failures that precipitated the tragic collapse of the First Republic — unbridled regionalism, electoral fraud, state-sanctioned corruption, and the politicisation of everything serious, such as the security and economy — are continuously replicated by successive generations of political elites. Each generation claims to understand the national tragedies of the past, yet each reproduces the exact institutional dynamics that triggered those ruptures.
We quote history in anniversaries and public lectures, but our approach to governance largely remains unchanged. Some will argue that it is worse. We do not learn from history because we treat historical knowledge as an ornamental academic exercise, rather than an imperative for structural reform.
When history is weaponised…memory becomes a catalyst for retribution instead of being a teacher of reflection, caution and progress. Every new generation is taught whom to mistrust based on acts committed long before they were born.
The Arsenal of Memory
If we do not extract constructive lessons from the past, what then do we do with it? We seem to have turned it into a weapon.
In his essay On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche distinguished between historical memory that serves human flourishing and history that poisons the present. Nietzsche warned against an obsession with the past that creates a “reservoir for grievances” — a state wherein a society becomes so intoxicated by old injuries that it loses the capacity to build a viable future.
This, for me, is the central dilemma of modern Nigeria. I have often told a few friends that I sympathise with people who possess retentive memories, because most of them use that gift to remember grievances, rather than the good. The engagement with our past has largely devolved into a competitive accounting of historical injury. The 1966 military coups and the devastating Civil War are rarely examined through an objective, institutional framework meant to foster structural reconciliation. Instead, they are routinely weaponised in daily political discourse to justify ethno-regional marginalisation or to cultivate sub-national resentment.
Across the geopolitical zones, historical narratives of pre-colonial dominance, colonial favour, and post-independence betrayals are invoked not to build empathy, but to validate contemporary prejudice, resource hoarding, and political exclusion. And who benefits from all this chaos? The people or the elite?
As my friend Husein Adeto Bello succinctly observed, the underlying issue lies in why people engage with the past in the first place: many study history merely to acquaint themselves with historic grievances and inherit legacy talking points, without ever pausing to ask what they can do to ensure their generation — and the next — does not perpetuate those same grievances.
When history is weaponised in this manner, memory becomes a catalyst for retribution instead of being a teacher of reflection, caution and progress. Every new generation is taught whom to mistrust based on acts committed long before they were born.
Whose History Are We Learning?
This brings us to a fundamental question in the philosophy of history: Whose history is actually being told?
History is never a neutral recording of facts; it is an interpretive narrative shaped by power and context. In a multi-ethnic federation formed through arbitrary colonial amalgamation, there is no singular, universally accepted “Nigerian narrative.” There exists, instead, a contested marketplace of competing ethnic, regional, and religious memories.
When history is learnt through the narrow lens of tribal insularity, it fails to construct a shared civic identity. Instead, it codifies “us versus them” dynamics, ensuring that the act of remembering directly incites more hatred. And we can’t grow with such history.
The historical decision to remove history from the basic school curriculum for years left a critical void. A generation grew up learning their past not from rigorous, critical academic inquiry, but from informal, highly partisan narratives. These informal histories function primarily as national myths of triumph and victimisation:
- One group learns a history in which they are the perpetual victims of systemic betrayal.
- Another learns a history framing them as the rightful, historical custodians of power.
- Yet another learns a history that regional erasure has rendered almost invisible.
When history is learnt through the narrow lens of tribal insularity, it fails to construct a shared civic identity. Instead, it codifies “us versus them” dynamics, ensuring that the act of remembering directly incites more hatred. And we can’t grow with such history.
Reclaiming Yesterday for Tomorrow
The continuous cycle of political instability, inter-communal conflict, and ethnic polarisation in Nigeria validates the fear that knowing the past can easily degenerate into nursing old wounds.
If Nigeria is to break this destructive cycle, we must transition from what Nietzsche termed “reactive” history to a critical history — a deliberate practice that scrutinises past structural failures, disarms historical grievances, and prioritises civic nation-building over score-settling.
Until we stop using yesterday as a weapon to fight today’s political battles, we will remain trapped in Hegel’s grim reality: a nation that speaks of its history incessantly, yet learns absolutely nothing from it.
Umar Yakubu is the executive director of the Center for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity.
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