We are living in a time of unprecedented planetary alignments. Since 2020, the world has experienced one profound shift after another, creating a pervasive sense of uncertainty and transition. The two Chronocrators Saturn and Jupiter that met every 20 years in Earth signs for nearly 200 years settled into Air signs in 2020. In February this year, Neptune with an orbital period of 165 years conjoined with Saturn at the very beginning of the zodiac - 0° Aries, an alignment hardly ever seen before at that degree. Pluto, whose 248 year orbit means that it was last in Aquarius from 1777 to 1798 is back in Aquarius. For some context to Pluto in Aquarius, those were the years of the French revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the last years of the American Revolution.Pluto in Aquarius is deeply associated with revolutionary advancements and progress. As at today, every major outer planet has moved from the slower Earth and Water signs to faster paced Air and Fire. On the ground, the Queen is dead, Trump is president again, two major wars are ongoing and the post-war global order is giving way to a new multipolar world.
Against this backdrop of global uncertainty and change, Uranus, the planet of disruption, awakening, innovation, progressive thinking, reform, and inclusivity, begins its seven-year journey through Gemini in Nigeria’s 12th house.
Traditionally associated with hidden institutions, clandestine affairs, collective unconscious and memory, unseen forces, and endings, the 12th house is also the final house before the eastern horizon where a new day begins, technically known as the Ascendant. It carries the symbolism of the valley of shadows before the dawn, where what has been concealed is gradually brought into consciousness. It is also like the dark, watery womb, where the future is quietly conceived and incubated before emerging into the first light of a new day.
It is in this hidden landscape that Uranus begins its work of disruption, reform, and transformation, awakening the soul of the nation, renewing the national psyche, and expanding the collective consciousness preparatory to the emergence of a new national story and identity.
This is not a flash-in-the-pan transit. It is a seven-year evolutionary cycle in which Uranus in Gemini and Pluto in Aquarius work in concert to reshape the nation’s future. As Pluto moves through Aquarius, one of the signs associated with Uranian principles in modern astrology, it deepens and institutionalizes the awakenings being initiated by Uranus. As Uranus changes consciousness, Pluto changes the structures through which that new consciousness is expressed.
In the course of the transits of both planets (Pluto in Aquarius for 20 years and Uranus in Gemini for 7 years), they form harmonious alignments with Nigeria’s natal Sun at 7° Libra, opening a window of opportunity where historical divisions can be healed through dialogue and the emergence of a more inclusive vision of our nationhood, leading to a renewed national identity rooted in justice, inclusion, reconciliation and a reimagined social contract based on relationship of mutual trust and benefit among the various entities that make up Nigeria; to carry the nation into its next phase of transformation.
The years 2026–2033 will be defined by truth and transformation. May I suggest that this is the time for Nigeria to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The work of the Oputa Panel of the Obasanjo era fits in perfectly here; the search for truth after all is an ongoing process and not a one-off event. As Chinua Achebe wrote in There Was a Country, “a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body.” A nation cannot sustainably change how it acts until it has first changed how it thinks, and to change how it thinks, it must become aware of its hidden patterns and blind spots.
The awakening of our national consciousness serves as the foundation upon which this 7-year season of transformation unfolds.