A Country Without Earthquakes –Yet Shaken By Itself

By Max Amuchie

The thought returned to me recently during a quiet moment of reflection, and with it came the memory of a conversation from many years ago.

Professor Jubril Aminu passed away on June 5, 2025, in Abuja at the age of 85. In the days following his death, many tributes recalled his intellectual brilliance. Those who knew him in his student years often spoke of his exceptional performance at the medical school of the University of Ibadan. I was told that he had set an academic record there that remained unmatched for many years. Whether that record still stands today I cannot say with certainty, but his reputation for academic brilliance has certainly endured.

My awareness of him, however, did not begin in medical circles. I cannot remember precisely when his name first entered my consciousness, but I do know that he became Minister of Education the year preceding my admission as a student at the University of Calabar. A year after he was appointed minister, a nationwide controversy erupted over the location of a cross at the Christian chapel of the University of Ibadan. The debate stirred strong opinions across campuses and in the wider public space, reflecting the delicate intersection of faith, identity, and public institutions in Nigeria.

Like many students of that era, I followed the debate closely. His name surfaced repeatedly in the national conversation.

But my earliest personal recollection of someone speaking about him with familiarity came a little later.

It was during our NYSC orientation camp in Zaria, Kaduna State. In the first days of camp, friendships formed quickly, as they often do when young graduates from different parts of the country suddenly find themselves sharing the same uncertain future. One of the friends I made was Sanusi Maiwada, who had studied agriculture or agricultural engineering — I can’t remember precisely — at the University of Sokoto, now Usmanu Danfodiyo University.

We spoke often about what life after national service might look like. Opportunities, ambitions, and the usual uncertainties that follow graduation. At one point during one of those conversations, Sanusi mentioned casually that after camp he intended to travel to Lagos to see Professor Jubril Aminu about his plans. I remember being struck by the ease with which he spoke the name — as though access to a figure of such stature was not unimaginable. This is because at the time we were at the orientation camp, Aminu had left office as minister but remained one of the truly influential Nigerians of the day.

I felt Sanusi Maiwada was very lucky to be associated with a figure of such formidable stature: an ex-minister who remained deeply consequential in the national scheme of things.

That brief exchange stayed with me. I lost contact with Sanusi Maiwada after NYSC and never learned what became of his plans. But the moment lingered. It was another small thread that kept Professor Aminu present in my awareness long before I would encounter him personally.

Years later, in 2012, that meeting finally happened. I was the Bureau Chief of BusinessDay in Abuja when my colleague, Tony Ailemen, arranged an interview with Professor Aminu at his Asokoro residence. By then, he had left active public life, having held a succession of roles that exposed him to the breadth of governance and academia: Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Vice Chancellor, University of Maiduguri; Minister of Education, Ambassador to the United States, and Senator of the Federal Republic. He had seen Nigeria from the corridors of policy and politics, and he had seen the world — engaging with foreign leaders, international institutions, and global challenges.

That meeting revealed a man whose insight was shaped not by speculation, but by decades of experience in public service and leadership at the highest levels. He remained a widely respected figure in the then-ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and commanded considerable regard in his home state of Adamawa. Yet despite his stature, he carried his perspective lightly: measured, observant, and quietly piercing.

During that interview, against the backdrop of global natural disasters — Hurricane Katrina in the United States, famine in Ethiopia, the harshness of the Sahara Desert, earthquakes in Haiti, Japan, and Turkey, and typhoons in the Philippines — he made a remark that has lingered with me ever since: while other nations contend with nature’s fury, we in Nigeria, largely spared from these hazards, somehow manage to create disasters for ourselves.

Delivered quietly, almost conversationally, the observation was unmistakably clear.

Across the world, geography dictates many of the challenges nations must confront. Japan lives with earthquakes powerful enough to reshape coastlines, as seen in the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami which triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In the Caribbean, the 2010 Haiti Earthquake reduced entire sections of Port-au-Prince to rubble. More recently, the 2023 Turkey–Syria Earthquakes flattened neighbourhoods across southern Turkey and northern Syria. Across the Pacific, the Philippines regularly braces against storms like Typhoon Haiyan — among the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded.

In Africa, the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, while the harshness of the Sahara Desert shapes both the lives and survival strategies of communities and countries across the Sahel. In these cases, nature imposes hardship, yet human ingenuity and adaptation often determine survival.

In Nigeria, by contrast, the crises we face are largely self-imposed, avoidable, and yet persist due to governance failures and neglect. These are nations and regions where nature itself periodically rebels; Nigeria, in contrast, faces no such geological hostility.

We sit outside the world’s major earthquake belts. We have no active volcanoes threatening cities. Hurricanes rarely form along our coastline. Nature, in many respects, has been generous to Nigeria.

Yet our country often operates under the shadow of permanent disaster. Not because the earth trembles beneath us, but because we repeatedly create tremors ourselves.

Our most persistent crises are not natural. They are manufactured: kidnapping, insurgency, banditry, corruption, collapsing infrastructure, policy inconsistency, and institutional fragility have become recurring emergencies in our country. None of these emerged from the soil. They emerged from decisions.

Consider insecurity. Across large parts of our country, farmers abandon fertile land out of fear. Highways that should connect markets instead generate anxiety. Communities negotiate daily life under the shadow of armed groups. This is not the work of nature. It is the consequence of institutional weakness and leadership failure.

The same pattern appears in infrastructure. Countries prone to earthquakes enforce strict engineering standards because the ground beneath them cannot be trusted. Nigeria faces no seismic threat. Yet buildings collapse with disturbing frequency. The earth did not move. Standards did.

Even flooding, one of the few natural hazards we occasionally experience, often reveals deeper governance failures. Blocked drainage systems, chaotic urban planning, and construction on waterways transform ordinary rainfall into a catastrophe. The rain falls everywhere. But disaster follows where planning disappears.

The observation Professor Aminu made that afternoon still lingers. It was a simple remark, delivered almost in passing. Yet the longer one reflects on it, the more unsettling its truth becomes. Nigeria is not threatened by earthquakes. We are not battered by hurricanes. Nature, in many respects, has been kind to us. Yet we often behave like a nation permanently under disaster.

In the next edition of The Sunday Stew, we will take a deeper look at this paradox — examining, one by one, some of the most significant self-inflicted and man-made crises that continue to hold the country back. Because if our greatest problems are indeed created by us, then understanding them clearly may be the first step toward finally overcoming them.

Don’t miss it.

Stay seasoned.  See you next Sunday.