My flight from Lagos to Port Harcourt is bumpy. I am attending a "Get Nigerians Reading Again" programme organised by the Rainbow Bookshop; I am guest of honour. My parents are with me. They stand by, smiling when people walk up to say, "We are so proud of you! Our writer!" This is what I love about being home, this unquestioning we-ness, this sense of being part of a whole.

The revered poet Gabriel Okara, who is 84, sits nearby as I read from my novel Purple Hibiscus. Questions follow. Is the father in your book like yours? Are you married? How do we get Nigerians reading again? Somehow I am expected to whip out absolute answers from my pocket. As I think of a response, I remember the ex-senator in Lagos who told me with a self-satisfied grin that he didn't read books. Finally, I say: "We must start early. We must give children access to books. We must make reading present in the lives of toddlers."

I was eight when I fell in love with books at the library in Nsukka, the university town where I grew up. But libraries all over Nigeria are now dusty, empty, underfunded shells.

Back in Nsukka I sit in my old room and work on my second novel, set before and during the war in Biafra. I ask my parents about life 50 years ago. I am startled to hear that white people went to better hospitals under British rule, but less startled to hear that my father's pay in Biafra was spasmodic. He is used to that; he is a Nigerian academic. Right now, he is owed years of pension and doesn't think he will ever get it. If he didn't have children he wouldn't be able to pay for his diabetes medicine. I look at him, Nigeria's first professor of statistics, a 73-year-old of integrity, and am overwhelmed by a sense of wrongness.

I feel something similar when, days later, we travel to our home town, Abba, in Anambra State, for my cousin Pauly's funeral. Pauly was a plump schoolteacher with the warmest laughter. He should not have died. He went to hospitals where doctors were on strike or were so ill-equipped that they found "nothing wrong" until someone suggested evil spirits. If our health system worked, Pauly would still be alive and would finish the story he had started telling me about his life as a Biafran teenager.

Later, I think of him as I read about the G8 cancelling some African countries' debts. Nigeria is not included. Nigeria owes $34bn, most of which piled up under our military dictators. The newspapers call it "our" debt. It is not. The money went into personal bank accounts, yet although we have repaid an amount equivalent to the original loans, each year we pay interest that is three times our education budget. If Abacha's government, for example, was so illegitimate his ministers were denied foreign visas, then his debts should be just as illegitimate. Now the people paying for his debt are those who danced in the streets when he died.

The G8 makes me think of what we Igbo call "nkali", which translates loosely as "being greater than another": the nkali of eight men. Even the magnanimity they are being asked to show is laced with condescension. Africa is their junior brother. A whole continent in the hands of eight men. There is something both enviable and vulgar about this power, and I fantasise about sitting at a table with a Zimbabwean and Ghanaian to decide the economic fate of America and Europe.

But reality is what matters. The G8 should cancel Nigeria's debt. By doing so, they would allow another Pauly to live and another professor to retire with dignity and another child to love a library. Or maybe not. Mine is a government of warped priorities, building stadiums while classrooms have no windows. Governors give away millions at weddings, while little is done about Aids. University students are paid thousands to attend lewd government parties. Who can say if the money saved would be used for health and education? We won't know unless we try.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun will be published by Fourth Estate in 2006