I started putting this article together in my thoughts, in the quiet echo of legacy, seated at the 90th birthday ceremony of Uncle Sam Amuka, founding publisher of Vanguard Newspapers, a man whose life and voice helped shape Nigerian media. It’s a gathering not just of people, but of memory, of what Nigeria once made possible.
During the Thanksgiving service, I discovered that Chief Olusegun Osoba, Uncle Sam’s lifelong friend, had come up with him at The Daily Times in the 1960s. They began as young reporters: humble in means, rich in promise, shaped by an institution that valued rigor, integrity, and potential. One would go on to found Vanguard, one of Nigeria’s most enduring newspapers; the other would rise to become a two time governor of Ogun State. Their journeys, though different, are threaded with the same DNA, institutions that once opened doors, careers built on merit, and public lives rooted in service, not spectacle.
Watching Uncle Sam smile, I couldn’t help but wonder if Nigeria still makes room for such journeys.
The Golden Era of Institutions
In their time, Nigeria still had what you might call functional ladders. Newspapers like Daily Times weren’t just press outlets, they were pipelines. Civil service wasn’t glamorous, but it was respected. Young people with ideas, discipline, and grit could enter a newsroom, a courtroom, a classroom, and over time, earn their way into public prominence. It wasn’t easy, but it was possible.
These institutions were imperfect, of course, but they worked enough to launch lives. In Sam Amuka’s generation, Nigeria was still young enough to believe in growth, and still honest enough to reward it.
Today, that scaffolding feels absent.
Where Are Our Ladders Now?
We still produce talent, perhaps more than ever. Across tech, literature, activism, and entrepreneurship, young Nigerians are breaking ground. Nigeria is brimming with potential, but potential needs structure to grow, and ours is crumbling. Especially in industries that don’t come with foreign investment or shine. If you’re not in oil, finance, tech, or something glamorous, the infrastructure for upward movement has all but collapsed.
Where is the Daily Times of our day? Not just in name, but in function, a place where a sharp mind from a modest background can become an institution?
The breakdown goes beyond media, it’s a wider erosion of the spaces that once nurtured growth, dignity, and direction. Our universities are broken. Our civil service is politicised. Our courts are slow. Where past generations saw a path, younger Nigerians now see the public sector as a place to avoid, not aspire to.
The ladders didn’t just disappear. They were gradually pulled up, by nepotism, by corruption, by a system that now runs on gatekeeping rather than gate-opening.
A Different Kind of Climb
However, there’s a new spirit brewing. In today’s Nigeria, ingenuity refuses to wait for permission. A coder in Lagos turns a weekend idea into a startup. An investigative journalist publishes on Substack when legacy newsrooms look away. A civic activist livestreams a protest and reaches a million people. A designer, shut out of national contracts, builds a client base in Berlin and Nairobi. The system may stall, but the energy finds other lanes.
Yet, even these new paths are often lonely, unsupported, and exhausting. To succeed today is to hack the system, not to rise through it.
And therein lies the tragedy: while previous generations rose with Nigeria, today’s youth must rise in spite of it.
A Nation That Punishes Promise
At the heart of this is not just systemic dysfunction, it is a betrayal of promise. A country that cannot provide clear ladders for its brightest minds, but still expects them to serve it, innovate within it, or believe in its future, is gaslighting its own children.
The real danger isn’t just that we’ve stopped building new ladders, it’s that we’ve allowed the old ones to rot. And when institutions collapse, they don’t just fail today’s systems, they quietly take entire generations down with them. Every broken sector condemns thousands of young people to futures they’ll never fully enter.
Still, the Legacy Speaks
Sitting in that room, watching Uncle Sam laugh about stories from his early newspaper days, I’m reminded that Nigeria did not always function this way. The evidence is here, alive, breathing: Uncle Sam, and the statesman he came up with. Their very lives are arguments against despair.
Their legacy is not just a memory, it is a mirror. A reminder of what can happen when institutions work, when promise is met with opportunity, when ladders are built, not broken.
The task ahead for our generation is clear: to fight not just for personal success, but for systems that allow success to be scaled. To build the new Daily Times, the new Vanguard, the new institutions that outlast individuals. Because without ladders, there is no ascent. Only isolation.
And perhaps, at a future 90th birthday, someone will look back and say, “That was the generation that brought the ladders back.”
Eyesan Toritseju is a Lagos-based strategist and cultural commentator. In his writing, especially through his column, Cosmopolitan Nigeria, he examines how African societies confront the legacies of their past while reimagining identity, influence, and progress in the present.
