After the Red Sea

Wola Joseph-Condotti

October 6, 2026

On Independence Day last week, as Nigeria turned sixty-six, President Tinubu told the nation that we had “passed through our own Red Sea.” He spoke of hard reforms behind us and an age of prosperity ahead.

I will leave the economists to debate the numbers. What stayed with me was the image. Because anyone who knows the story of the Red Sea knows a quiet, inconvenient truth about it.

The crossing was never the end. It was the beginning of the harder part.

The Miracle Was the Easy Part

We love the Red Sea as a picture of deliverance. The waters part, the people walk through on dry ground, the enemy is swept away behind them. It is the part we put on the posters.

But read on. The same people who sang on the far bank were grumbling within days. The water was bitter. The food ran out. The generation that walked out of Egypt spent forty years learning to become a nation, because it is one thing to leave a place and quite another to be ready for where you are going.

The miracle delivered them in a day. The formation took a lifetime. And God, it turned out, was far more interested in the second than in the first.

Leaders Confuse the Crossing with the Arrival

This is not only a national lesson. It is one of the most common mistakes I see in leadership, and I have had to learn it myself.

We celebrate the crossing as though it were the destination. The deal closes, the turnaround holds, and something in us wants to declare the journey done. But the crossing is only ever a threshold. What determines whether it meant anything is the long, unglamorous walk that comes after, when the cameras have gone and the real building begins.

Any leader can have a good day. The question is what you do with the ordinary ones that follow. A rescue is a moment. A rebuilt institution, a healed culture, a nation that works, these are wilderness projects, built slowly by people willing to keep walking.

The Nigeria We Are Walking Toward

So let us talk about the land ahead, because that is the part that should occupy us now.

Nigeria is one of the youngest nations on earth. The majority of us are under thirty, and within a generation we will be among the most populous countries in the world. That is not a burden to be managed. It is, rightly stewarded, the single greatest asset any nation could ask for. Our future will not be decided by oil, or even by policy. It will be decided by whether we prepare these young people to build.

And that is the real work of the wilderness. Not waiting for a better government, though we should demand one. Not waiting for the economy to turn, though we pray it does. The work is formation, raising a generation with the character, the competence, and the conviction to carry a nation the founders could only imagine. Every young person mentored, every institution built to outlast its builder, every standard refused to be lowered, is a brick in a Nigeria that does not yet exist.

We will not see all of it. That is the nature of building for a future larger than yourself. The founders of 1960 did not see today, and we will not see 2060. But we can decide, now, what we are planting for those who will.

Final Thoughts

Nigeria at sixty-six has crossed many seas, and by grace will cross many more. But our real work was never the crossing. It is the building that comes after, the patient, faithful, generational work of becoming the nation our freedom was always meant to produce.

The sea is behind us. The land is ahead. And the only question that has ever mattered is whether we will keep walking, and keep building, until the generation coming after us inherits a Nigeria worth the long journey here.

Happy 66th independence. The crossing is done. Now we build.

About Author

Wola Joseph-Condotti

Wola Joseph-Condotti is the CEO, Eko Power Limited. She is a Harvard-trained lawyer and passionate advocate for faith-driven leadership, gender equity, and energy transition in Africa. She writes from the intersection of power, purpose, and personal growth.