Blessed are those who are yet to give up on Nigeria. This column affirms this proposition this morning with every sense of responsibility. It is very easy to give up on Nigeria. There is something terribly frustrating and even infuriating about a country so scandalously blessed in human and material resources only to end up as the poverty capital of the world.

Yet there are many patriots out there who have refused to give up on the nation, who insist that it is not over until it is truly over.

For the past six weeks or so, Segun Gbadegesin, notable philosopher, traditional savant, quintessential Yoruba patriot and The Nation’s ace columnist has turned the page of his column to interrogating proceedings from a remarkable gathering of Yoruba scholars, intellectual luminaries, military wonks, public analysts, political crusaders and celebrated researchers carefully assembled to proffer the way forward for a troubled nationality in an even more troubled and endangered nation.

In the event, it has turned out a remarkable feast of deep introspection and splendid intellection; a conclave of some of the best and brightest of Yoruba minds both at home and the fabled diaspora. In Yoruba cultural parlance and as the name itself hints, Apero is the gathering of the wise and wizened, the grizzled and the gnarled particularly in times of despair and political uncertainty. As the Yoruba themselves put it, we gather to share wisdom and not to distribute folly.

The exchanges have been remarkably frank and forthright shot through with countervailing insights borne along by remarkable hindsight. From security for the constituent units of the nation, through the vexed issue of restructuring, to the educational disaster staring the nation in the face and the collapsed ethos of omoluabi which has pushed the Yoruba people into an ethical and normative free fall, nothing was off the table. You can only trick a woman into bed once, as they say.

Nothing exemplifies this sense of urgency and the dire plight of a people under siege in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation more than the clarity and pained lucidity of Gbadegesin’s unrelenting exposition and remorseless gloss on the proceedings of the gathering in the past six weeks. The retired professor of Philosophy at Howard University writes lucid and deceptively artless prose that hides a telling punch which is occasionally deployed to devastating effect.

A critique of this vast nature with its far-ranging and far-reaching recommendations and proposals for drastic reforms cannot but reveal willy-nilly the conditions of its own possibility. Although like a wise Yoruba elder and major stakeholder in the political fortunes of his people in the post-military dispensation, Gbadegesin tries to pull his punch, the anger sometimes breaks through. In the event, Apero is a subtle and restrained critique of the extant political hegemony in Yorubaland.

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At the inception of Apero, yours sincerely was invited by the organisers to contribute to one of the proceedings as a lead discussant. But prior commitments on the home front and a clash of engagements precluded that possibility. One had since been monitoring events from the side lines.

But talk of odd telepathic developments. Just as one was about to put his intervention on paper, a call came through from Gbadegesin urging the columnist to appear as a lead discussant in the final session by comparing the situation in the run up to independence and the First Republic to the current order. In the time honoured old Yoruba code of honour, refusal this time was out of the question.

Comparing the pre-independence era in Nigeria up to the period leading to the fall of the First Republic with the epoch of post-military irruption in the country is like comparing an apple to an orange. They are both fruits, but they taste differently. This is because the trajectories and antecedents are dissimilar and they are powered by different dynamics of power appropriation.

Let us first erase some historical illusions from our minds. In the history of human evolution, there has been no completely organic or seamlessly idyllic society. Historians and sociologists of the human condition insist that if there is anything about organic societies, it is that they are always gone. In other words, human evolution is marked by protracted periods of war, hunger, famine, natural or man-made pestilence followed by peace, progress and rapid development.

The notion of an idyllic and organic society of remote antiquity is an ideological weapon or merciless stick often deployed by embattled and besieged societies to whip existing recalcitrant realities into some tolerable order. Every monument to civilizational triumph is also a monument to appalling human suffering, unspeakable barbarities and terrible bestialities.

For example, the much-maligned and bitterly resented military intervention in Nigeria’s postcolonial history also had its high noon of visionary capacity building and patriotic developmental impetus. These were the years of rolling National Development Plans and infrastructural frenzy whose extant legacies subsist.

In his autobiography, The Son of a Peasant Farmer, the late Tayo Ogungbemile, a former students union leader who rose to become the Acting Comptroller General of the Custom and Excise Department, narrated how he walked up to Brigadier Adeyinka Adebayo’s office to present a policy paper on how to rescue indigent Yoruba undergraduates from the jaws of misery and truncated ambition through a means tested bursary programme.

To his surprise, somebody from the governor’s office got in touch with him the following day to inform him that the proposal had been approved and adopted as state policy. If only this semi-confederal arrangement even within the ambit of military rule had been sustained, Nigeria would have been a better and happier place.

But the colonial foundation on which all this rested was creaky and barely fit for purpose and to get a better perspective we must go back to the amalgamation and incorporation of hitherto separate entities by the conquering imperialist masters. For a protracted period after the amalgamation, the colonial authorities did not show much interest in the organic health and unity of their new ward beyond safeguarding their economic interest which was the main reason for conquest in the first instance.

For decades after amalgamation, Nigeria  was ruled very much like a dual-state nation with the amalgamated components allowed to do their own stuff as long as the overriding economic interest or what Lugard infamously dubbed “the dual mandate” was not threatened or impaired. Even the developmental projects were geared towards facilitating this economic mission.

The British authorities appeared more interested in insulating the stable and cohesive order they met in the north of the nation from being infiltrated and contaminated by the anarchic regicides and rowdy republicans down south. Consequently, all interactions among the emergent political elites of the amalgamated units were forbidden, prohibited and virtually criminalised.

It was only around 1949 in the run up to independence and as the decolonising project took on a strong hue that the British authorities began to realise what a hot potato and combustible colonial combo they had on their hand. A seminal rethink of the colonial policy and overall imperialist organogram became inevitable. A belated awareness of the recalcitrant reality that based on significant cultural, spiritual and political differences, a loose confederal arrangement is the best for the colonial behemoth arbitrarily and whimsically hewn out of the heart of Africa.

There were two important fruits of what has been called the civil war of colonial authorities in Nigeria. First, there was a significant thaw in the policy that precluded interaction between the elite of the north and their southern counterparts. Second, the colonial administration began to load the dice of political ascendancy in favour of the indigenous political elite spawned by colonization, having realised the political anomaly of handing over power back to the traditional institutions they had supplanted.

The immediate fallout of the ensuing struggle for political supremacy between old tradition order and the new indigenous elite was the political imbroglio between the Alaafin of Oyo and Chief Bode Thomas which led to tragic consequences. In the north, the premier, the Sardauna of Sokoto, deposed and banished the Emir of Kano just to show the powerful northern emirate who was in charge.

But by and large the new elite consensus was at play in shaping the political destiny of the nation and in producing a new federal constitution acceptable to all at the Lancaster House Conference in 1958. In the new found spirit of give and take, Obafemi Awolowo was prevailed upon to drop his exit clause and his romantic notion of classical federalism which had no basis in actual reality while Zik and Ahmadu Bello were persuaded to modulate their unitary federalism and confederal  predilection respectively.

This was arguably the finest hour of these statesmen and the constitution that arose from their deliberations  was a great spur to national unity and rapid economic development. With each of the three regions in dynamic competition, Nigeria recorded its fastest growth rate ever. A great mammoth had erupted from Africa and the entire world took note.

This was the situation in the first few years after independence until the old demon of hegemonic domination reared its head again, lending credence to expert prognostication that wherever there is a master nationality bent on a wilful domination of other constituent units, peace, stability and progress are at best a very tenuous proposition.

The peace, stability and progress of Nigeria was shattered in the early hours of January 15, 1966 and the country has never really been able to find the magic of stability and prosperity ever since. The festering contradictions have since compounded the National Question pushing Nigeria to the very edge of failed statehood and aborted nationality. Unless we find the time and energy to recuperate the essence and spirit of the Lancaster house conference, Nigeria will continue to remind the world of Albert Einstein’s famous mad man.