The Nation Newspaper

Category: Banji Akintoye

  • What is restructuring?

    Many readers of this column are contacting me with the message that they do not have a clear idea about what is meant by restructuring. What is restructuring? How will a restructured Nigeria be different from today’s Nigeria?

    There have been many published responses to these questions. I will try and state mine. But before I do that, I need to point out humbly that I am not offering any new or original ideas on the subject, since all I will say here have been repeatedly offered by me and many other Nigerians. Moreover, I must remind my readers that in 2014, Nigeria held a National Conference in which nearly 500 selected citizens, representing all parts of Nigeria, met for about four months, debated the question of restructuring, and reached agreement by 70% majority vote on all that they agreed upon. In my view, the report of that conference is a very important resource on the issue of restructuring.

    First then, what kind of structure does the Nigerian federation have today? I would say that what we now have is not really a federation. The basic idea of a federation is that the various distinct parts of a country (especially a country comprising different ethnic nations) should be made a federating unit (or state). Each state should have the constitutional power to manage its unique problems and concerns, to develop its own resources for its people, to manage its own security, and to make its own kind of contributions to the well-being of the whole country. The central entity (or federal government) should manage common matters like the defence of the country, the relationship of the country with the rest of the world (or international relations), the country’s currency, the relations between the states of the country, and general principles like defence of human rights. That, essentially, was the federal arrangement that the fathers of the various sections of our country (Awolowo, Ahmadu Belo and Azikiwe) agreed upon in the 1950s.

    But, since independence, our leading politicians, and our military leaders (both, mostly from the Arewa North) have gradually destroyed this structure and replaced it with a structure in which the federal government is the controller of virtually all power and all resources as well as the power to develop all resources, and in which the states have no control over their resources and must depend on federal allocations of funds to exist at all. The federal government is over-burdened, controls too much money, has become egregiously inefficient and corrupt and, essentially, is destroying Nigeria. The states are impotent, cannot develop their resources, cannot fight poverty in their domains, and cannot make their contributions to the progress and prosperity of Nigeria. The cumulative effect of all these is that Nigeria and Nigerians have become horribly poor, that most public facilities (roads, electricity, water installations, public administration, etc.) are not working or have perished, that most Nigerian youths are unemployed and hopeless. The relations between Nigeria’s nations has degenerated into enmity and hostility. Crimes have made life very unsafe all over Nigeria. In various regions of Nigeria, and for various reasons, Nigerian youths are demanding the breaking up of Nigeria.

    Restructuring means that all these must be changed. It means that we must return to the kind of federal arrangement which our fathers evolved in the 1950s – even though we must now have more states than the three regions of the 1950s.

    How many states should we have? Very many people say that the present 36 states are just too many, and that with 36 states we are spending too much money on state administrations. Many of these people are suggesting that we should adopt the six zones now popular in our political life (North-west, North-east, North-central, South-west, South-east, and South-south), and make them our new states. Some others want the 36 states to stay. Their best known argument is that it is going to be extremely difficult to wind up the present 36 states in order to recreate the four Regions that we had by 1963, or to create the six zonal states.

    The 2014 National Conference heard all these arguments, as well as the special concerns of the various peoples of the North-central (aka Middle Belt) where religious and inter-ethnic conflicts have always been rampant. To be free from neighbours who are hostile and aggressive, various peoples of the Middle Belt asked for small states of their own. In sympathy with these peoples, the National Conference decided on nine states in each zone – making a total of 54 states. Critics of this 54-state decision have pointed out that 54 states are unreasonably too many, that each of the 54 will be weak, and that their weakness will only result in making the federal centre even stronger than before.

    But the conference also took certain other decision relevant to this. The most important was that, after creating the 54 states, any group of culturally related states may agree to merge together into a zonal federation inside the over-all Nigerian federation, or to set up development institutions or programmes for their collaboration in development. Another was that in those areas where the people desire to move across state boundaries to join their kith and kin, a referendum should be held to determine their wish – and if the referendum approves of their wish, the state boundary should be shifted to join them with their kith and kin.

    About the adjustment of power and resource control between the federal government and the states, the National Conference took very important decisions, all of which would take a lot of duties and responsibilities away from the federal centre and transfer them to the governments of the states. The most obvious concern the control and development of resources, and the control and management of education at all levels (though the federal government would still have some role in tertiary education – that is, education at the post-secondary level).  There are many others – but they are too many to be detailed out in this column.  The total effect is that the federal government will be smaller, leaner, control less money, and become much more efficient. The states will become what states are supposed to be in a federation – namely, the dynamic centres of development and growth. Hopefully, our states will resume the competition which used to exist among our regions in the 1950s up to 1966. As a result of that competition, the Western Region’s government worked closely with the Region’s farmers until they made Nigeria the second largest exporter of cocoa in the world; the Northern Region’s government worked closely with their region’s farmers until they made Nigeria the largest exporter of groundnuts in the world; and the Eastern Region’s government worked closely with their region’s farmers until they became the largest exporters of palm produce in the world. Cocoa earned the biggest income, made the Western Region our richest Region, and supplied most of federal foreign exchange. This is what development means – developing resources to generate money for further development.

    No federal government can do all these things from one centre. By 1965, Nigeria exported 675,000 metric tons of groundnuts. By 1984, after the transfer of all resource control and development to the federal government (gradually from 1966 on), Nigeria exported only 25,000 metric tons of groundnuts. Can you see now how the deep poverty that now grips the North was started. The same happened to our cocoa and pam produce farmers. By 1984, Nigeria had ceased being a serious exporter of these products. Someone might say that in the place of the income from these products, there came the income from oil. There is a big difference. Income from oil is not income produced by our people; it is income produced by other peoples on our land, income earned from rents, royalties and licenses, income going directly into the hands of our men in federal power, for them to mess around with, to steal, and to waste. That is why oil has been a curse to our country and our people. In contrast, income from our agricultural and other products is produced by our own people (the fathers and mothers of our families), comes directly into their hands, for providing directly for our families.

    If we restructure our federation now, and our states become again the rival centres of resource development, we may begin to see revival, and we may narrowly escape the break-up of Nigeria. If we continue to hold on to the present structure of our federation, Nigeria will surely break up – and very soon. Human tolerance for poverty and deprivation in the midst of plenty, and for chaos, hostility, violence and insecurity, has a limit. In Nigeria, we have reached that limit.

  • Better to agitate peacefully

    From various regions of Nigeria, ethnic nationalist agitations are popping up – some for rational restructuring of our federation, some for outright secession. The youths of our South-east and South-south lead in flexing their muscles and hitting out. The youths of South-west in their tens of self-determination organizations, tend for now to get busy refining their tools. In the North-east, the picture is confusing as ethnic nationalism mixes with religious fundamentalism and terror. The youths of the North-west who, some months ago, demanded the “termination of this failed experiment called Nigeria” are quiet for now because they are waiting to see what the return of federal power to their North-west will mean to their needs and expectations.

    Any kind of ethnic nationalist activity used to be taboo in Nigeria, and used to be treated as some sort of crime, mostly because of the devastating experiences of the civil war of 1967-70. But that has now changed considerably. Nigerians are becoming more and more aware of the legitimate rights of nationalities in the world. Rather than quit or decrease, ethnic nationalist agitations are likely to increase and become more widespread. Some of the peoples of the Middle Belt are already beginning to rouse themselves.

    And the reasons for all these are easy to see. Nigeria is grossly mismanaged and misgoverned. The poor governance has made abject poverty and deprivation the lot of most Nigerians. It has also turned all inter-ethnic relationships into hatred and hostility. Most   nationalities, large or small, therefore want some sort of change that will give them more control over their own life and affairs. Insistence on keeping the affairs of the country rigidly centralized is breeding desperation – and if no change comes in this soon, Nigeria could soon implode. Muscle flexing and threats by law enforcement authorities can avail nothing. Soon, even the very best of armies will be too weak to push back what the nationalities desperately want. In fact, whatever happens, some nationalities (most likely our largest nations, Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani, and some of our small nationalities too) seem very likely to become separate sovereign countries soon.

    In the circumstance, the only constructive plea that an elderly citizen like me can make to the angry youths of various parts of our country is to eschew violence, death and destruction in their agitations. Violence is no longer really necessary. Even seeking the separation of one’s ethnic nation from Nigeria does not necessarily have to be accompanied by violent riots, armed dissidence, destruction and death, and defiance of the law. The problem is that most ethnic nationalists are not aware that the Nigerian situation and realities themselves, as well as similar situations in many countries of the world, and the laws of the world’s international community, have pushed the Nigerian debate beyond the level of state authoritarianism and strong-arm measures, and have charted irrepressible legitimacy for ethnic nationalist activities and demands – even demands for separation.

    In a book which General Obasanjo wrote in 1998, the book titled This Animal Called Man, he suggested that the right to secede, and the procedure for peaceful secession, should be clearly stated in subsequent Nigerian constitutions – in emulation, according to him, of some clauses like that in the constitution of Ethiopia. That is the growing consensus among most leaders of the world today. We might add that those clauses in the Ethiopian constitution made it possible for formerly war-ravaged Eritrea to at last peacefully secede from Ethiopia.

    Then, in an important speech in Lagos in 2002, the veteran nationalist, Chief Anthony Enahoro, suggested that the right of secession should be enshrined in the Nigerian constitution, in agreement with Obasanjo’s earlier proposal, and in conformity with the laws of the UNO and the Organization of African Unity (now African Union).

    In addition, various other Nigerians have written books and articles, and made important public statements, on the issue. In a book which I published in America early this year – Coming Revolutions in Black Africa, I described what is happening in Black Africa – namely, that our ethnic nationalities are rising, and that the countries and boundaries created by European colonialism are coming under serious pressure.

    At the United Nations headquarters in New York in 2016, President Buhari, while answering a question which he was asked about the agitations of Igbo Nigerians for Biafra, stated that those agitating for a separate Biafra should, to be taken seriously, establish a political party to promote their demands. At home and abroad, President Buhari was understood to mean that agitations for Biafra are part of worldwide experience today, but that as long as the agitators for Biafra continue to go on wild or violent street demonstrations, confrontations with law-enforcement agencies, and defiance of the Nigerian state, Nigeria would have no other option than to send the law and law-enforcement agencies against them; but that, if they would adopt peaceful political means to promote their cause, Nigeria would respond to them by discussion and negotiation. In short, Buhari stated the laws as specified by the resolutions and conventions of the United Nations Organization. That is the open door for all ethnic nationalists.

    Professor Ango Abdullahi, speaking for the Northern Elders Forum in a public interview last month said, “…if Nigerians are tired of staying together, they should be prepared to accept divisions instead of remaining in agony and disappointment with one another. Every Nigerian should be able to speak his opinion about the state of the country…” Concerning the specific agitation for Biafra by a young leader named Nnamdi Kanu, Professor Abdullahi said, “…the issue of Biafra is all part of the discussion of restructuring Nigeria…Yes, if Biafra means negotiations, yes…If it means Igbo want to have a country of their own separate from Nigeria, it means a matter of discussion and we are prepared for the discussion”. Then he added the following crucial point about how people should handle the issues of ethnic nationalist demands: “If it is discovered that the law of a country is violated, that somebody has gone beyond his fundamental rights, the law is very clear on this. What perhaps government is concerned about is that violence was part of Kanu’s agitation, to realize his dream by force. I think that is what government is trying to tackle… So if Kanu is talking about Biafra, he is free to talk about Biafra and everybody is free to talk about his understanding of the Nigerian state. We are always talking that the Nigerian state is not working and (asking) how can we make it to work? And if the best option is to call for separate countries, why not?”

    Thus, the pointers towards peaceful ethnic nationalist activities, and even peaceful agitation for separation from Nigeria, have been open, and are open. But, unfortunately, most ethnic nationalist movements and leaders are still not aware of this and still prefer violent street riots, confrontations with law-enforcement agencies, illegal secret preparations for violence, and various acts of defiance of the Nigerian state and its laws. Instead of all these, the peaceful road is open.

    Various nationalist groups in the world have, in the course of the past century, employed violent means at various times for achieving their secessionist goals – the Scottish nationalists, Welsh nationalists, Northern Irish nationalists, Basque nationalists (Northern Spain), French Canadian nationalists. For some years, the Basque Nationalist movement, ETA, was rated as the most sophisticated terrorist organization in the world. None of these terrorist outfits achieved their purpose of separation, or even local autonomy, for their nations; all they succeeded in doing was to generate confrontations with the governments of their countries. The Scots and Welsh only began to achieve local autonomy in Britain when they changed to peaceful political methods – and they are now on the path to full independence. The same is true of the Basques in Spain and the French Canadians in Canada. Of course, our youths too are capable of peacefully pulling some of our nations out of the mess that Nigeria has become.

    Young nationalist agitators, being young, are naturally attracted to rough and tough activism against the country from which they want their own ethnic nation to separate. But even their best use of violence does not usually confer success on their cause. Here is a lesson for all our youths.

  • NEF ready for restructuring

    One of the most prestigious civic organizations of Arewa North, the Northern Elders Forum, has made a historic statement. Speaking to Daily Sun this past week, the spokesman for NEF, Professor Ango Abdullahi, former Vice-Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, informed Nigeria and the world that the forum is ready for discussions over the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. He added, in fact, that NEF is even ready for discussion of the issue of Biafran, and any other, demand for separation from Nigeria.

    In the South, throughout the acrimonious restructure-or-not-restructure debate that has been going on since 1999, the general picture as seen by the peoples of the South has always been that the elite of Arewa North are all opposed to restructuring. The very history of how the federation was gradually distorted between independence in 1960 and 1999, and how all power and resource control in our country was pulled together under the federal government, justifies such feelings about the northerners among southerners.

    The leaders of the three regions of our federation had in 1957, after long and constructive negotiations, agreed to a rational federal structure giving the federating units of our federation the reasonable amount of autonomy that would enable them to develop their resources, and that would make it possible for the different peoples of our country to live harmoniously together as one country. That structure benefited all regions.

    But, as soon as some North leaders had found themselves in power in the federal government at independence in 1960, they had started to seek for more federal control over the regions. This had led them to launch a federally sponsored attack on the Western Region in 1962, resulting in the suspension of the elected government of that region and the general brutalization and pulling down of the region. When the federal authorities backed a blatantly rigged Western Regional election in 1965, most people of the region revolted, and the revolt ended in a virtual collapse of all governance in Nigeria, and in an ultimate military coup in January 1966. A counter coup, organized by angry military officers from the North followed in July 1966 – and thereafter, coup after coup followed, producing military dictator after military dictator from the North, each of whom found ways to pull power and resource control to the federal centre, thereby gradually reducing the federating units of our federation to impotent entities.

    The northern political elite gloatingly welcomed these developments, and a sort of plot evolved between them and northern military officers to give the federal government an all-controlling power over Nigeria. The coming, from about 1970, of increasingly large revenues from the mineral oil of the Niger Delta added greatly to the North’s incentive to centralize all resource control. In 1999, the last of the northern military dictators enshrined all the centralizing developments in a constitution for Nigeria. And that constitution was strongly welcomed by the northern political elite – and stubbornly defended since then by them.

    Virtually all persons and organizations of note in the South have spoken up in support of a restructuring of the federation. Almost all demand a return to the 1957 federal arrangement. More and more have been saying in recent times that further delay in restructuring the federation could, or even would, break up Nigeria. In this atmosphere, some citizens of the Igbo South-east revived demands for a separate country of Biafra and quickly attracted larger and larger followings. Some citizens of the South-south followed suit, and some of these are employing violent means to press their demand. In the South-west, tens of “self-determination” groups have emerged, many of them with many thousands of members, and most of them committed to working for a separate Yoruba country out of Nigeria. In the Middle Belt, many youth groups have emerged too, generally committed to the defence of their peoples against political and terrorist pressures – and more and more of these are speaking the language of separation from Nigeria also. Thus, as things stand today, Nigeria does not appear to have much time. The imperative now is simply this: “restructure now or break up”.

    Therefore, Professor Abdullahi’s assurance to the rest of us that his prestigious group of Arewa elders does not oppose restructuring but positively welcomes discussions over it, creates a sudden shaft of light.  He says, “Well, if you read our communiqué in Kano recently, we categorically stated that the Northern Elders Forum is prepared to engage in any discussion with any group that is supporting restructuring of Nigeria, so, this means that we are fully supporting restructuring”.

    Concerning the specific agitation for Biafra, Professor Abdullahi said, “You see, the issue of Biafra is all part of the discussion of restructuring Nigeria…Yes, if Biafra means negotiations, yes.  It’s all a matter of discussion, if it means Igbo want to have a country of their own separate from Nigeria, it means a matter of discussion and we are prepared for the discussion”.

    He also has positive things to say about separation in general. He says, “…f Nigerians are tired of staying together, they should be prepared to accept divisions instead of remaining in agony and disappointment of one another…You see, what I am saying is that every Nigerian should be able to speak his opinion about the state of the country…”.

    Then he adds the following crucial point about how people should handle the issues of Nigeria’s future. He says, “If it is discovered that the law of a country is violated, that some somebody has gone beyond his fundamental rights, the law is very clear on this. What perhaps government is concerned about is that violence was part of Kanu’s agitation, to realize his dream by force; I think that is what government is trying to tackle to my understanding. So if Kanu is talking about Biafra, he is free to talk about Biafra and everybody is free to talk about his understanding of the Nigerian state. We are always talking that the Nigerian state is not working and how can we make it to work? And if the best option is to call for separate countries, why not?”

    The historically important purport of Professor Abdullahi’s statements is that we Nigerians can, by discussion, decide the future of our country. That comes from an understanding of the fundamental facts of our country’s existence. Our country is made up of many different nations, each living in its own homeland, each possessing and cherishing its own culture, each endowed by its creator with its own sovereignty, and each hugging its own pride about itself and its ways. If some act of history happens to push all of these nations together under one common sovereignty, that act does not, and can never, eliminate each nation’s right to its original sovereignty. That is why every known multi-nation country in history, and every known empire ruling many peoples together, no matter how long it existed, ultimately broke up. That means that we Nigerians must reckon with the basic inevitability of Nigeria’s dissolution.

    Naturally, the urge of separation from a multi-nation country tends to be stronger in a larger nation than in a smaller one. The Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa-Fulani, each numbering about 50 million in population, are three of the largest nations in the world. Even with the best of good intentions, each of these three nations is very unlikely to remain for very long in a multi-nation country like Nigeria. If any of our three giant nations now shows impatience about its being part of Nigeria, we must not judge or treat it as if it is doing something wrong, something reprehensible. That is what nations as human groups do all over the world. Our other, smaller, nations will come to the same behaviour sooner or later too.

    For a multi-nation country, a federation is only a palliative – and palliatives are, by nature, only temporary. A unitary arrangement is an aberration, and aberrations tend to quickly self-destruct. That means that if we hold on to our present unitary arrangement, Nigeria will break up very soon.

    Still, we must thank Professor Ango Abdullahi for throwing in a shaft of light at this dark moment in Nigeria’s history. Whether we choose restructuring or breaking up, we know now that doing it with violence is uttermost folly. The future of our kind of country is pre-determined by forces beyond our control.

  • S/West and Fulani herdsmen’s terror

    In the past couple of weeks, we in the South-west have not been experiencing much of Fulani herdsmen’s terrorism in our part of Nigeria. We hear of it still going on very brutally in parts of the Middle Belt – still more or less regularly taking the lives of many people, destroying villages, and forcibly seizing territory in Benue State, Southern Kaduna and other parts of the Middle Belt.

    Obviously, we in the South-west would be fools if we allowed ourselves to fall into the thinking that it has ended in our South-west. It has not. In fact, whenever one travels through any part of the South-west these days, one cannot avoid the very clear impression that the cattle herders and their cows are streaming in larger numbers than before to the South-west. They are everywhere, from the tall grass terrains of our northern territories (in northern Ekiti, Osun, Ondo, Oyo and Ogun states), all the way to our southernmost districts, including our Lagos State in our farthest south. They are roaming in places where there is, obviously, only thick forests and broad-leaf vegetation and no visible grass. Even though the reports of the herdsmen’s violent attacks on farms and farmers and villages have been muted in the past few weeks in our South-west, we need to watch out. Their coming at all, and their coming in the larger numbers that we are now seeing, is not good for our well-being and cannot be good for our future.

    We must entertain such fears for obvious reasons. When, at the early high points of the Fulani herdsmen’s massacres and destruction of farms and villages in various prats of our South-west, we cried out in pain, the responses we got were such as should always keep us on our guard. Some leaders of the association of Fulani cattle herders responded to us that there was nothing we could do to keep their herdsmen and their cows out of our homeland, and that their being Nigerian citizens, and their living under the ECOWAS agreements, gave them the unlimited freedom to enter with their cows into any part of our land, even if they were engaging in violence and destruction there. We, as Nigerians, deserved protection by the Nigerian federal government; but, not only did the President of Nigeria keep silent about these outrages by his Fulani kinsmen terrorists, the general behaviour of the federal government was such as to make us suspect that the powers and influence of the federal government were being used to support the Fulani herdsmen terrorists. We can see, as many Nigerians have pointed out in the media, that the Nigerian Police seem to fear to arrest the murderous terrorists, even when the terrorists carry AK47 rifles in the public, and even when the terrorists are suspected to have killed people or destroyed property.

    When the government of our Ekiti State made a law to curtail the rampages of the Fulani terrorists in Ekiti State, and the leaders of the herdsmen’s associations responded that they would disregard the law and defy the Ekiti State government, we could only conclude that they derived their defiant spirit from the support they were getting from federal sources. And, finally, it is no longer a secret that our governors are under federal pressure to accept the cattle herders, and to provide land for them, in our states.

    In short, there are good reasons why we must suspect that there is a plot in high places to inflict some horror on our homeland in Nigeria, and that the Fulani herdsmen terrorists are part of the instruments of the plot. Most informed Nigerians believe by now that some very influential Nigerians are behind the radicalization of the Fulani herdsmen in these times – that some influential Nigerians are supplying sophisticated weapons to them, training them in military assault tactics, indoctrinating them against the rest of Nigeria, and attracting foreign elements (Libyan militia men and Fulani desperadoes from neighbouring countries) to come and join them in killing and destroying in Nigeria. The ultimate objective of all this remains a puzzle to us; we only know that it cannot possibly be good for us or for the other Nigerian peoples that have been under the attacks since 2014. There is no doubt that this is some sort of invasion.

    Nomadic cattle rearing is one of the most primitive survivals of barbarism into the modern world. In most countries where it still exists, the authorities are striving to bring it to an end and to replace it with modern cattle ranching. In contrast, in Nigeria, the authorities are manoeuvring to create space for it even in regions where it never existed even in ancient times. The record of our history shows that we Yoruba, living in a homeland that is mostly tropical forests, have never engaged in nomadic cattle rearing. In the course of the past 6000 years, we have steadily developed our sedentary crop farming into the most successful in tropical Africa. On the basis of that success, we built the richest urban civilization in the history of Black Africa. But today in Nigeria, we are being pressurized to push back on civilization in order to create space for barbarism on our land.

    We must make it abundantly clear to Nigeria and to the world that we will never yield to this outrage. We will pursue our best and most sustainable options in the circumstance. We will not harass or antagonize our governors in this matter. We know the kind of pressures they are operating under. We only demand of them to dare to speak out clearly in ways that fully and unambiguously express our wish. Then we ask that they should, like the Ekiti State governor, make laws that will push back on nomadic cattle rearing in our states.

    And finally, to nail our approach to this problem definitively, we must ask our state governments to embark on programmes for the development of modern cattle ranching. This would mean that, in the grasslands of the northern provinces of our states, we should set aside areas that we designate as ranch-lands; and in such places we should encourage our own citizens to acquire, at minimum costs, appropriate sizes of land for ranches; and we should set up programmes for helping them to develop their ranches and to enforce ranch regulations and security. As a corollary to this, we should set up cattle markets in the same northern areas of our homeland, and encourage our business folks to establish slaughter facilities or abattoirs, and to put frozen meat trucks on the roads to supply beef to our towns and cities. We have reached the point at which we should prohibit the rearing of cows through our farmlands, and prohibit the driving of cows though our city or town streets. We have also reached the point at which we should see to it that our beef retailers will buy their beef supplies at frozen depots and sell with smaller frozen facilities.

    If other people desire to bring cows for sale from outside our region, they should bring their cows, by approved pathways, to our cattle markets and sell there only. In all these, there are great business opportunities for our people. There are also great business opportunities for citizens of northern states in their own states, if they would choose to take advantage of what we are doing. We will gladly buy the cattle that they bring to our cattle markets. These are things we and they can do quite easily. For us and for them, it is a win-win proposition. But we must not wait for anybody; we must go right ahead regardless. If we handle this well, we in the South-west can soon become a major exporter of beef.

    In summary, we must not let ourselves get embroiled in wild and messy battles over our farmlands. We must mobilize the factors of civilization to win the primitive war that some people have chosen to wage against us. Let us win it – in ways that are peaceful, in ways that will advance our progress and prosperity. I hope that our governors – Akinwumi Ambode, Ibikunle Amosun, Abiola Ajimobi, Rauf Aregbesola, Rotimi  Akeredolu and Ayo Fayose – are reading this. And I hope they will spring into action. If they do, they can count on our powerful backing at every step.

  • Grabbing current crisis to take right decision

    A whirlwind of mostly negative emotions is sweeping over Nigeria. While a dwindling few still see some hope in the Buhari war against corruption, most have given up on it. Daily garish stories of discovery of tomes of cash stolen from Nigeria’s treasury, and of huge super-expensive houses abandoned and denied by their owners, generate fleeting excitement and no more. Hardly anybody still believes that the recovered money and properties are being returned to Nigeria’s coffers and not to the pockets of some favoured individuals in today’s high echelons of power. Beyond the fanfare and the hoopla, no culprit gets penalized. In many cases, we are aware that looters of public wealth are successfully wielding their influences and connections to negotiate their crimes out of existence. In short, the war against corruption, once the flagship of the Buhari presidency, has lost almost all credibility among Nigerians.

    But that is only a symptom. The root and stem of the disaster exist in the fact that the Buhari government operates essentially in the dark. Even the most uninformed Nigerians know that the power of their federal executive government is being exercised from some dark room by a hidden unelected “cabal” of Buhari’s close clansmen, while the elected president himself, sick, is hidden away in some other dark room where, according to stories in the media, even his own wife is not regularly allowed access to him. Even though we pray, and should pray, for the Buhari whom most of us once admired, the truth of the condition of our country is not lost on us. In terms of governance with integrity and dignity, Nigeria has been slipping steadily downwards since 1960; today, Nigeria has reached the absolute bottom. Nigeria’s brand of governance is now no more than a comic opera – a comic opera that makes people across the world laugh.

    Chaos, poverty and conflicts are the inevitable outcomes of poor governance. The first thing that Buhari and his clansmen did in government was to disband the political party that brought Buhari to the presidency and that won the majority of the National Assembly. It has been escalating chaos since then. The National Assembly has disintegrated into a medley, engaged in an almost childlike game of ego shows, without any desire to understand and grapple with the real needs of the country. And between the executive and the legislature, an inexplicable and shameful war rages perpetually. In the midst of it all, we seem to be breeding the barons that will lead as war-lords in our country’s near future.

    The poverty has been growing in our lives relentlessly – even though our country is one of the most endowed countries on earth. Nigerians rank among the poorest in the world in access to electricity, water, transportation, dependable public administration, entrepreneurial incentive, and business support services. Nigeria’s GDP is contracting. Nigeria’s foreign reserves are being wiped out. Direct foreign investment is declining. Businesses are closing up or relocating to other countries. Nigeria’s oil production declines off and on, and it is very difficult, off and on, to get buyers for Nigeria’s oil. Jobs are being lost day by day. The inflation rate is rising relentlessly. The Naira is in shambles. The prices of food and other essentials are daily rising beyond the capability of masses of Nigerians. More than 70% of Nigerians are said officially to be living in “absolute poverty”. Destitution and street begging are skyrocketing.

    Much of these economic disasters are sustained by the loss of economic development initiatives in the regions, states, and localities of Nigeria. Because of decades of relentlessly concentrating all of Nigeria’s power and resource control in the hands of the Federal Government, regional, state and local initiatives have more or less perished, and deep-seated feelings of helplessness reign, in all parts of Nigeria.

    The conflicts are growing everywhere. In the South-east, we have the protest demonstrations by youths of the Igbo nation – in the name of “Biafra”, demonstrations pitching masses of resolute youths against law enforcement operatives, and leading to many deaths. In various influential quarters all over the world, the Biafra cause is attracting attention and gathering sympathy.

    We have the stubborn youth revolt in the North-east, which has chosen Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism as its banner. In spite of frequent optimistic reports from the Nigerian military since Buhari’s presidency began, Boko Haram remains a big problem. Its support base in parts of the North-east does not appear to be seriously eroding – and that is because youth unemployment, hopeless poverty, and Kanuri nationalism are motivating and strengthening it.

    We have the old revolt in the South-south, with its many terrorist organizations. Since the advent of the Buhari presidency, the terrorist groups in the South-south have returned powerfully to business – because Buhari continues the regime of total federal power and resource control, ignores all advice and demands for the restructuring of our federation, and believes that the use of federal power and federal bribes will crush the South-south insurgency. After some weeks of respite, those boys are now threatening to return to the war.

    We may forget (but we must not forget) recent agitations from the Arewa North. In 2014, large numbers of mostly educated youths belonging to the Arewa Youth Development Forum held demonstrations during which they decried the poverty in the North and the “discrimination” by the Federal Government against the North. Speaking through their Chairman, Aliyu Usman, they issued a call “on all Northerners to rise and support agitations for a peaceful dissolution of this union called Nigeria”. They then warned all southerners resident in the North “to relocate to their respective states to make room for Northerners who would be returning home”. Nor have those voices been isolated voices. This past week, those youths were heard again.  And even eminent citizens (such as Prof. Ango Abdullahi, spokeseman for the Arewa Elders Council) have said almost exactly what these youths have said. Recently, the august statesman, Maitama Sule, called for a revolution. And the Emir of Kano, one of the most informed Nigerians about the Nigerian economy, has been warning seriously concerning the horrific poverty in the North.

    And we must not forget the several “self-determination” groups among the Yoruba nation of the South-west. Heavily educated, heavily equipped with advanced ideas, these youths are potentially the most potent weapon of change in Nigeria. If, or when, they launch out, Nigeria cannot easily contain them. They are suffering in desperate poverty right now, or fleeing abroad in droves, but they are likely to stop and fight back at home someday – and that may be soon.

    Most immediately devastating right now, we have the Fulani terrorism, which we choose to call Fulani herdsmen’s attacks on farmers across most of Nigeria. Countless Nigerians are daily dying violently from this terror. The federal government and federal security agencies are putting up no credible defence of Nigerians, and the government of most states, intimidated by the federal establishment, are reeling in doubt and impotence while their people are being killed. In self-defence, most non-Fulani Nigerian communities are becoming dangerously radicalized and militarized.

    In totality, we are heading towards something big – something big and terrible. If we let it come, it is likely to wreck a lot of what we all hold dear, take the lives of a lot of our dear ones, and shake Africa to its foundations.

    Should we wait for it to come? My answer is No – and I am sure that most Nigerians would agree with that answer. There is news that the federal government intends to call some kind of national conference specifically on the issue of Fulani terrorism. I hope they do that. And I hope that when the conference convenes, it will seize the freedom to consider all aspects of the Nigerian crisis that has now reached dangerous heights – all aspects including whether we really want to continue to live together as one country, and if the answer happens to be Yes, then a thorough establishment of the conditions and rules for our remaining as one country. God knows we have reached such a point. Better to part peacefully than to implode in rivers of blood.

  • Is Nigeria’s collapse unavoidable?

    Every country has its inner, intrinsic, structure. A country that is made up of one nationality (a people with their own homeland, culture, language, etc.) is different from another country in which many different nationalities, each occupying its own homeland, are combined. To exist in reasonable harmony, a country’s man-made structure (that is, its constitutional structure) must harmonize as much as possible with its intrinsic structure. When the leaders and rulers of a country organize their country in ways that are manifestly and defiantly disharmonious with their country’s intrinsic structure, they condemn their country to instability, discord, conflicts, and probably disintegration.

    The refusal of Black African countries to respect this wisdom is the principal reason why almost all independent Black African countries have been experiencing instability, conflicts and violence. Different European empire builders came, grabbed some expanse of African territory, ignored the African nationalities that inhabited each such territory, and called it a new country – with one name and one government. For the next 40 years or so, the colonial rulers were so busy trying to make profit from their African ventures, and they were so distracted by big troubles (two World Wars and a Great Depression) in their own continent, that they could not pay serious attention to issues such as appropriate constitutional structure for their African territories. In the course of the 1960s, under pressure from Africans demanding independence, and from a world that was becoming hostile to imperialism, the European colonialists hurriedly cooked up some sort of leadership for their African possessions and left. That is the basic story of every Black African country since independence.

    At that point of independence, a great task fell on the shoulders of the new African leaders of each of these countries – the task of organizing their country properly and giving it a chance to be stable and peaceful – so as to be able to develop and prosper. The core of this task was to ensure that each nationality in their new country (no matter how small) would be respected, and feel comfortably and proudly belonging, in the new country. In every country made up of many different nationalities and given only one central government by the colonialists, it was necessary to restructure by creating constitutions allowing the various nationalities to have some freedom to manage some important parts of their own affairs. That means we Black Africans should have chosen some sort of federal structures for most of our countries after independence.

    Unfortunately, in not a single one of Black Africa’s multi-nation countries did the leaders even ask what needed to be done in this all-important matter of living together as one country. Just a few examples will do. In Black Africa’s first independent country, Ghana, the various nationalities asked at independence to be allowed to manage some of their own affairs locally. A constitution of that nature was easily possible.  But the first ruler of the new country, and the great hero of Africa, Dr. Nkrumah, thought that their requests were dangerous to the unity of Ghana, and he launched a political fight aimed at stamping the requests down. That led to crises and big troubles – all of which could have been avoided. These troubles destabilized Ghana and (reinforced by economic troubles) ultimately destroyed the great hero.

    In nearly every one of our other countries, the leaders simply assumed too that their countries were already finished products as organized by the colonial rulers, and that all they needed to do was to make their governments strong and capable of stamping down any show of freedom by any of the component nationalities. And the results since then in country after country have been conflicts, military coups and barbaric military dictatorships, mind-boggling corruption, pogroms, efforts at ethnic cleansing or even genocide.

    South Sudan is our youngest country in Black Africa.  After decades of brutal sacrifices in bush wars, South Sudan, comprising about 80 different nationalities, wrenched itself free from Arab-controlled Sudan and became an independent country in July 2011. Many leaders of the different nationalities proposed that the nationalities should be given some freedom to manage much of their affairs locally, and that the central legislature should be “the voice of the nationalities”.  We were all very happy when the leader of the independence war, our brother Salva Kiir, as president of the new country, said during the independence celebrations that South Sudan would be a country “where cultural and ethnic diversity will be a source of pride”. Very many Black Africans (including this writer) rushed letters to the leaders of South Sudan congratulating them and begging them to be mindful of the fact that their country was a county of many different nationalities – and to avoid the mistake that other Black African countries have been making. Sadly, it did not work. President Kiir soon rejected all advice about a federal structure or decentralization. His Vice-President and many others (belonging to various nationalities), accused him of aspiring to a dictatorship. The nationalities plunged into conflicts – and became engrossed in mutual killings. International observers on the spot are now reporting that hundreds of thousands have been killed, and countless thousands are being killed month after month.

    It is the same pattern as this in almost all our countries – with only variations of detail. The Nigerian story is easily the most bizarre and most painful of all. Nigeria is the Black African country with the greatest promise of prosperity and greatness – the home of about one-fourth of all Black Africans, one of the most literate populations at independence, and the land of enormous natural resources (including great land, forest and mineral resources, and some of the richest crude oil and gas deposits on earth). To protect their economic interests in this naturally rich country after it would have become independent, the British colonialists sought to hand Nigeria, at independence, to “a friendly people”. Fearing the highly educated Yoruba and Igbo of the South, they maneuvered the constitution, the population census, the internal boundaries, the politics and the elections, and thus placed Nigeria’s federal power in the hands of the Hausa-Fulani of Arewa North who were the least educated and patently the least ready for the tasks of modern development. The British also established for the new overlords the direction by which they would be able to use their control of federal power to widen their dominance and to keep their control going indefinitely.

    But all of those were the acts of British foreigners fending for their own country’s interests. The duty of Nigeria’s new rulers of Nigeria was obvious and different – it was to make Nigeria stable, successful and prosperous. Unhappily, the group which the British foisted upon Nigeria, the Hausa-Fulani political leadership, chose not to work for the success and greatness of Nigeria. They chose to use their control of federal power to entrench their sectional control eternally over Nigeria – in the Nigerian military, in the Nigerian federal civil service, over all corners of Nigeria, to convert federal agencies (courts, electoral commission, police, secret service, etc.) into the tools of Fulani sectional ambitions, to use federal money to corrupt, emasculate, and enslave prominent citizens all over Nigeria, and to resist any attempt at evolving a true federal system that would have decentralized power across Nigeria. Even when some southerners (Obasanjo and Jonathan) have been allowed to sit on top of the system, their presidencies have changed nothing. Enticed and stupefied by the enormity of power and money under their control as presidents, they have simply gloried in it all – and even added to the centralization of power, as well as the despotism and the corruption.

    In the past 18 months, back in control of Nigeria under the Buhari presidency, the Hausa-Fulani leadership has gone back to the game of intensifying the centralization and the special privileges of the Hausa-Fulani. In just about one year, Hausa-Fulani appointees have been filled into more than 80% of positions in the leadership of virtually all federal agencies. Fulani herdsmen have become a special breed of citizens that are free to carry rifles brazenly in a Nigeria in which possession of fire-arms is a serious crime, a special breed of citizens who are free to slaughter non-Fulani and non-Hausa farmers across most of Nigeria with essentially no fear of arrest.

    Judging from the way Nigeria is now tottering fearfully, the rejection of the Hausa-Fulani system of control has reached the point of generating Nigeria’s collapse. Professor Ango Abdullahi said recently that it is the Arewa North that has been bearing the burden of Nigeria’s unity. He is wrong – very wrong. In fact, it is the Arewa North that has been destroying Nigeria. The future of Nigeria is now locked in one unavoidable reality: change structure, or perish.

  • Buhari’s historic burden

    As a young university student in the 1950s, I saw my country beginning to blossom in the world. As one of the leaders of various student organisations, I had the privilege of travelling fairly extensively in Africa and some other parts of the world. I could see that as independence approached, other countries of Africa looked up hopefully to Nigeria to provide the needed leadership on their continent.

    One day in Addis Ababa, a few months before Nigeria’s independence, the Ethiopian Minister of Education (later Prime Minister), Endaktachu Makkonen, placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “My young Nigerian brother, congratulations in advance on your country’s coming independence. All of us Africans hope that as you Nigerians prepare for your independence, you are also preparing for the leadership role expected of you in our Africa. A lot of things on our continent will soon depend on your Nigeria. We hope you Nigerians understand that.”  Those remarks filled my heart with pride and joy and my eyes with tears – and I can never forget them. (They still tend to fill my eyes with tears today).

    The greatness has never happened – and it may never happen.  We started to stumble in the very first years after independence, mostly because the persons in charge of our federal government at independence failed us abysmally. They developed the destructive ambition of making the federal government the controllers and commanders of all of Nigeria, instead of striving to make the Nigerian federation work harmoniously along the lines in which it had been structured by our pre-independence leaders. We are used to blaming the soldiers who then seized control from these first federal rulers, because these soldiers then went on and twisted our federation beyond recognition, and thereby destroyed the prospect of orderliness and harmony in our multi-nation country. But it was our first civilian federal rulers that started the downward spiral – and it is still their thoughtless and dangerous ambition that still guides the relentless destruction of our country even now.

    Quite early in the course of the destruction, one of the pre-independence makers of our federation, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, even though he had suffered battering and brutalisation at the hands of his colleagues, came back, and tried to return our federation to its right course.  He gave everything to this new effort, studied widely and intensively in order to be a solid and faithful servant of his country, and attracted armies of patriotic, mostly young Nigerians, to work with him in the noble venture. We in those patriotic armies, working under his guidance, were ready to work sacrificially to return our federation to its rational structure, and employ our country’s growing incomes to turn our country into a land of stable prosperity and greatness – a land of equal educational opportunities for all children, of skills promotion for all youths, of rural development and agricultural progress, of rapid entrepreneurial and business growth, of high quality productivity in all fields, and of great commerce, with emphasis on exports, connecting with the whole world.

    Unfortunately, the escalating rot and corruption proved too strong to be overcome by Chief Awolowo and his patriotic armies. Nigeria continued its relentless fall. By 2005, many informed observers worldwide were predicting that Nigeria could not possibly continue to stand – and that Nigeria would soon fall. Today, those predictions are getting more and more frequent, and more and more plausible.

    As I have watched this dismal picture day after day in my old age, I can’t believe that this is still the Nigeria I used to know. When Muhammadu Buhari stepped onto the scene as elected president, I breathed some sigh of relief. We all knew him as an enemy of public corruption, and he was true to that reputation when he immediately declared war on public corruption. But, in his hands in general, our country has fallen faster and faster – and appears now to be about to experience some sort of terminal collapse.

    Sadly, this is mostly because Buhari obviously cannot free himself from the clutches of the ideas and ambitions of his little corner of Nigeria – his Fulani ethnic group. I don’t think that any objective observer would now doubt that what is closest to Buhari’s heart are the plans and projections of his Fulani people. Even though most sections and peoples of Nigeria are demanding that the Nigerian federation should be returned to its pre-independence structural health, Buhari has flagrantly responded that he has no respect for their voices and no intention to look at what they are saying. His appointments to leadership positions in the security forces seem to indicate that he believes that the security forces will do for him and his clansmen the work of silencing the many other peoples of Nigeria.

    But the worst of all the signs of continued decline of Nigeria is now the relentless and unrestrained attacks on security and peace in Nigeria by Fulani nomadic herdsmen, a section of President Buhari’s kinsmen. In most parts of Nigeria (but particularly in the Middle Belt and the South),  Fulani herdsmen are destroying farms with their cows. If farmers dare to protest, the herdsmen, armed with some of the modern world’s most sophisticated weapons, then fall upon them, killing and maiming men, women and children, and destroying their villages. In some parts of the Middle Belt indeed, the herdsmen have been shown to the whole world to be engaging in systematic ethnic cleansing and genocide. To all this, the Buhari federal government has not shown any firm and effective response. In fact, from many parts of the country, the outcry has been that the local victims tend to suffer more from the responses of security personnel than the villains tend to do. Farmers are afraid to go to their farms, and some have been reported as saying that they have totally given up farming.

    This is no longer politics. For most peoples of Nigeria, it is a potent existential threat. And the fear is making a lot of Nigerians edgy about Fulani or Hausa presence in their midst, since most people do not recognise the difference between the Fulani and the Hausa. Thus, in Ile-Ife in the Southwest, a city in which a Hausa trading and labour community has lived for probably centuries, an assault by a Hausa or Fulani on a local woman easily exploded into a conflict in which some Ife indigenes were killed – provoking a response which then led to the death of many Hausa and Fulani. In the light of what Fulani herdsmen are reported to be doing all over Nigeria without much official resistance, aggressive actions by Fulani or Hausa residents in any part of Nigeria can quickly be seen by the locals as another show of Fulani arrogance, impunity and disrespect of others.

    In short, we Nigerians have now reached the absolutely highest level of fear, distrust and explosiveness in our living together as peoples of one country. And it is a pity that all this has come in the time of Buhari’s presidency. Can he change things? I pray so.

  • Wrecking Nigeria! Enough is enough

    My message in this column today is an answer to the statements which Professor Ango Abdullahi, a respected Hausa-Fulani elder and president of the Arewa Elders Forum, uttered in an interview with The Punch a few days ago. Professor Abdullahi said again and again that the North (by which he must really have meant his North-west) is ready for Nigeria’s dissolution. By that he means that his Hausa-Fulani nation of the North-west (or Arewa North) would rather see Nigeria dissolved than see the Nigerian federation restructured in ways that most other Nigerian peoples (the vast majority of Nigerians) are demanding. He has said about the same things on other occasions before. And various Fulani leaders have said before that they would rather go to war than allow the Nigerian federation to be restructured into a proper federation. Many have even said that they would start a war rather than see their Arewa North lose power-control and resource-control over the Nigerian federation. And many have bragged that the North is ready for war – or more ready for war than the South.

    One Fulani notable named Aliyu Gwarzo wrote in 2014, ‘’When I say that the Presidency must come to the north next year I am referring to the Hausa-Fulani core north and not any northern Christian or Muslim minority tribe.

    The Christians in the north such as the Berom, the Tiv, the Kataf, the Jaba, the Zuru, the Sayyawa, the Bachama, the Jukun, the Idoma, the Burra, the Kilba, the Mbula, and all the others are nothing, and the Muslim minorities in the north, including the Kanuri, the Nupe, the Igbira, the Babur, the Shuwa Arabs, the Marghur, the Bade, the Bura, the Igalla, the Zerma, the Bariba, the Gbari and all the others know that when we are talking about leadership in the north and in Nigeria, Allah has given it to us, the Hausa-Fulani.

    They can grumble, moan and groan as much as they want but each time they go into their bedrooms to meet their wives and each time they get on their prayer mats to begin their prayers, it is we the Fulani that they think of, that they fear, that they bow to and that they pray for.

    Some of them are even ready to give us their wives and daughters for one night’s sport and pleasure. They owe us everything. This is because we gave them Islam through the great Jihad waged by Sheik Uthman Dan Fodio.

    We also captured Ilorin, killed their local king and installed our Fulani Emir. We took that ancient town away from the barbarian Yoruba and their filthy pagan gods. We liberated all these places and all these people by imposing Islam on them by force.

    It was either the Koran or the sword and most of them chose the Koran. In return for the good works of our forefathers, Allah, through the British, gave us Nigeria to rule and to do with as we please. Since 1960 we have been doing that and we intend to continue. The Igbo tried to stop us in 1966 and between 1967 and 1969 they paid a terrible price. They were brought to heel and since then they have been broken.

    No Goodluck or anyone else will stop us from taking back our power next year. We will kill, maim, destroy and turn this country into Africa’s biggest war zone and refugee camp if they try it.

    Many say we are behind Boko Haram. My answer is what do you expect? We do not have economic power or intellectual power. All we have is political power and they want to take even that from us.

    We must fight and we will fight back in order to keep it…The war has just begun, the Mujahadeen are more than ready and by Allah we shall win. If they don’t want an ISIS in Nigeria, then they must give us back…our power”.

    By now, the rest of us Nigerians have become accustomed to hearing our Fulani brethren talk in these ways about the affairs of Nigeria, and about those of us who are not Fulani or Hausa. For us, it all paints a horrid picture about the realities of citizenship in the country called Nigeria. Even if the Fulani were an absolute majority in Nigeria, it would still be unacceptable to hear them talk in these ways about the rest of us.  But they are not close to being a majority. At an estimated Fulani population of about 7-9 million out of the total of about 49 million Hausa-Fulani, the Fulani are a small minority among the Hausa-Fulani; and they are a much smaller minority among the total of about 190 million Nigerians.

    Whatever may have been the privileges enjoyed by the Fulani in the composite Hausa-Fulani society before the coming of British rule, the only thing that the Fulani can claim as qualification for their dominance over Nigeria since independence is British manipulation of everything in Nigeria before independence (census, constitution, politics, and the pre-independence election of 1959) in order to place Nigeria under the control of the Fulani. As one British official of the last years of British rule has since written in his memoir, the British wanted to leave Nigeria at independence in the hands of “a friendly people”. The reason for that is well known. The Second World War, 1939-45, had devastated the economy of Britain. British cities were in ruins. Reconstruction demanded a lot of resources. Nigeria was Britain’s largest and richest possession in Africa, and the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta promised to make Nigeria’s economy even richer. So, the British went all out to leave Nigeria in the hands of a friendly people – the Fulani.

    By accepting to be partner with Britain in such an arrangement, our Hausa-Fulani leaders entered into something that was bound to hurt our country; and it has hurt our country very calamitously. Its most destructive outcome is that it lured the Hausa-Fulani part of our country’s leadership into an unwholesome mentality concerning our country – the mentality whereby they view Nigeria as their empire bequeathed to them by the British, an empire that they must forever find ways to subdue and control.

    But, attempts to subdue and control the rest of Nigeria, to subdue giant and dynamic nations like the Yoruba and Igbo, as well as smaller but equally proud nations like the Kanuri, Ijaw, Edo, Ibibio, Tiv, etc, etc, was bound to be an impossible task. It has proved to be an impossible task, in spite of its appearing to have won some ephemeral successes. The employment of federal power for a big assault on the Western Region in 1962 in order to destabilize and subdue that region and crush its Yoruba leadership seemed successful for a start. But when the Yoruba responded, their response shook Nigeria to its foundations. Disaster upon disaster followed. The massacre of tens of thousands of Igbo folks in northern towns in 1966, and the 30-month bloody civil war which claimed nearly two million Igbo lives, all together seemed at first to have subdued the Igbo nation. Well, look what we have today! Are the Igbos subdued? The peoples of the Delta seem very small in the face of Nigeria’s military might. That military might has been hauled at them again and again for over five decades, and they are by no means subdued.

    Even the relentless distortion of our federation in an attempt to pile all power and resource control in the hands of a federal government controlled by Arewa North, how successful has it been in achieving its objective? Sure, it has reduced our federation to chaos and poverty, and paved the way for Nigeria’s disintegration. But does the intended northern control of all of Nigeria now look achievable or sustainable? All there is to show is endless Fulani threats of war, inter-ethnic vitriol, religion-based disruption – and the probability that Nigeria will never be a country happily bound together by love and mutual respect.

    It is time the Fulani leadership gave up this ambition; it is time they join hands with the rest of Nigeria to work for an orderly and sustainable federation. But if they choose to continue to hug the mirage of dominance over Nigeria, the rest of us must now seriously begin to tell them that having no Nigeria at all will soon be the outcome.

    My academic colleague, Prof. Ango Abdullahi, says the North-west will welcome the dissolution of Nigeria. I respond promptly that we in the South-west will welcome the dissolution of Nigeria too. As for the South-east and South-south, and the North-central too, there is no doubt about their responses. Since that is what the majority of Nigerian peoples and Nigerians seem to want, then let’s be civilized men enough to meet face to face and get it done. Enough is enough.

  • Nigeria: Agonising reminiscences!

    Wait a minute! So, yet again, for some days in the past two weeks, we Nigerians did not know the exact health conditions, and the exact whereabouts, of the president of our country?  This is so uncannily similar to another experience some eight years ago when we Nigerians did not know the true health status and the exact whereabouts of our elected president for weeks. For any Nigerian of my advanced age, these experiences cannot but open the gate to an agonizing walk down memory lane, and to uncomfortable questions.

    Let us face it, we as one country called Nigeria have waded in great agony through what, arguably, qualifies as the worst half-century in the history of any country in the world.  Virtually everything of importance that our country has touched in the past 56 years has been done in the dark, and has yielded rancor, hostility, poverty, conflicts and bloodletting.

    We entered into independence preparations through a federal pre-independence election whose outcome was manipulated and viciously contentious. It was the election that was supposed to produce the government that would lead us into independence, but it led us, first and foremost, even in the months before independence, into dark plots by some sections of our country against another, and into a future picture of conflict and doom.

    That 1959 pre-independence federal election also laid the foundations for the kind of elections we have had since then in this country – elections marked by utmost desperation and crookedness, elections whose results are pre-determined in dark corners by those who would rather see Nigeria crack and perish than let any true voting outcomes rob them of power.  The very first post-independence federal election of 1964 followed in the same mode, and was so blatantly corrupted and violent that Nigeria could not put a new federal government together for days. And yet, when the Western Regional election came some months later in 1965, the federal desperadoes were so bent on controlling the Western Region that they went on and rigged the election in the most insulting manner imaginable. That banditry provoked the youths of the Western Region into exploding – in a revolt that went on stubbornly for months, until all governance over Nigeria literally collapsed, and until some young officers in the army finally stepped in and shut down everything.

    In spite of over one decade of military dictatorship, mass pogroms that took tens of thousands of lives, and a horrendously bloody civil war that took millions of lives, nothing about our elections changed. When an election came again in 1979, the desperation, manipulation and crookedness returned too. Stunned beyond measure, the country could muster not much of a response. And the result was that when elections came in 1983 again, the confidence to rig and manipulate was much more shattering and much more infuriating. Violence followed in many parts of the country. In the then Ondo State, the youths declared outright war and, in only one single morning of carnage and death, almost totally wiped out a whole generation of local politicians who had helped the federal agencies to rig the Ondo State gubernatorial election.

    Another military coup soon shut down the civilian regime. And many years of military rule followed, dragging Nigeria down into the most corrupt and most murderous dictatorships in all its history. Even so, when elective politics returned in 1999, the crookedness and election manipulations returned with it. At the elections of 2003 and 2007, Nigeria’s rulers, declaring the elections to be “do-or-die” wars, broke all bounds with official violence and manipulation of election processes and results. International observers, many of whom had come at the invitation of the Nigerian government, were so shocked that they issued a worldwide report that essentially wrote off Nigeria as a country below the level of human civilization.

    But that was not enough to change anything as far as Nigeria was concerned. Only a few weeks ago, Nigeria recorded one of its most violent elections in the Rivers State as federal agencies and state forces faced off in a sickening blood fest. And so it goes on and on.

    In the midst of all these betrayal and degradation, a major blessing that God had programmed into the soil of Nigeria for millions of years was reached by human ingenuity. Nigeria became a big producer of mineral oil, and a wide door became open to wealth and prosperity for Nigerians. But Nigeria’s rulers had their own Nigerian kind of response to the blessing. They set upon the blessing with subhuman greed. Worse still, they abandoned the sources of wealth that Nigerians had developed before the coming of the oil bonanza – sources of wealth like cocoa, groundnuts and palm produce. In these ways, they gradually spread poverty into the lives of most Nigerians. In short, the Almighty God gave wealth and prosperity to Nigerians, but the rulers and leaders of Nigeria turned it all into hopeless poverty for their countrymen.

    The ordinary Nigerian ceased being part of the equation of national politics and governance. The purpose of all politics became simply the jostling for positions from which one can share in the oil money.  The brightest and best in our land abandoned truly productive enterprises and embarked on wheeling and dealing for some shares in the stolen oil money.  Nigeria has made much more money than most countries of the world, but almost all of it has gone for sharing among the powerful and influential – from the heights of the federal government to the most remote local governments.  Abject poverty gripped the lives of ordinary Nigerians. Public facilities and services disintegrated and perished, so that even our most important highways became death traps. The young person who sincerely desires to embark on some honest business can no longer do so, because he cannot find the loads of money that he would need to bribe public officials for the official documents and licenses that he needs, and because he cannot be sure of the electricity, the water, the roads, and the reliable public services that businesses need. Support was withdrawn from our schools. Our school teachers, denied proper teaching needs and often going for months without salary, lost heart as well as professional dedication.  Our children ceased to learn anything at school, and their performances in the vital public examinations plummeted disastrously. The same fate befell our universities, as the professors were deprived and battered into academic incompetence; and the little academic work that remains is frequently interrupted by professors’ strikes and students’ riots. Crowds of our educated men and women roam the streets without employment. Crowds of others haunt the embassies of foreign countries, in desperate efforts to flee from the hopelessness of their own country.  Many even attempt to reach the African Mediterranean coast and southern Europe by walking the hundreds of miles across the Sahara Desert – with many of them dying in the effort. Large numbers of Nigeria’s educated young women regularly get trapped into sex slavery in different parts of the world. We have produced, and are producing, some billionaires, most of whom are robber billionaires; but we have produced, and are producing, a country of mostly hopeless paupers.

    Naturally, in the midst of all these, inter-group hostilities and conflicts have grown in most parts of our country – nationality versus nationality, religion versus religion, immigrants versus indigenous hosts, cattle herders versus peasant farmers, etc.  On a regular basis, we are slaughtering one another with a ferocity beyond description.  A deep darkness has descended upon our country, and the soul of our country has shriveled and more or less died.  By the year 2004, informed observers in the world were predicting that our country would break up in a few years.  From all indications, we are very close today to the fulfillment of those dolorous prophecies.

    We Nigerians need to pray for our president. We need to pray, and pray fervently, about our country. And, may be, we also need to ask the question: Are we doing the wrong thing by stubbornly keeping this country together as one country? Is this a venture that God does not approve of?

  • Towards a true ‘party of change’ for Nigeria

    Recently, I wrote that Nigeria does not want another mega-party, but a true party of change. I added that our politicians who had recently tried to create a party of change, though they had put enormous good intensions, energy and resources into the effort, had made crucial mistakes, including the mistake of not negotiating thoroughly with groups inside the group. Since then, I have given some more thoughts to this matter.

    First and foremost, a true party of change must be a party of ideas and programmes. Its agenda must state clearly how the Nigerian federation will be restructured, and what the principles, process and time-table for restructuring will be. It must include programmes for change in all sectors of the Nigerian economy (modern agriculture, rural development, modern job skills development, entrepreneurial development, infrastructural development, educational improvement and expansion, small business development, business assistance programmes, export promotion, urban renewal, fiscal policy, cast-iron protection for public treasuries and bank accounts, systematic inclusion of the Nigerian Diaspora in Nigerian development, etc). It must include protection of the integrity of various regulatory agencies (Police, Electoral Commission, Judiciary, the Civil Service, etc) to enable them to do their duties properly. It must also include sincere plans for returning Nigeria’s elections to orderly, free, fair, peaceful, democratic exercises. And it must include a no-nonsense programme for eliminating public corruption. Very importantly, since sections of the leaders in the new effort will need to negotiate certain critical issues among them, the agenda must include assurance that this will be done in unalloyed interest of Nigeria, and in the open sunshine, and how the agreed details will be made spring-clear to all Nigerians.

    In yet one more direction, the true party of change must lead Nigeria back to sanity. In modern democratic systems, the well-established practice is that members of political parties own and control their parties, and politically active members have voices in the affairs of their parties. By and large, this was the kind of parties created by our founding fathers in 1951 – AG, NCNC, NPC, NEPU, etc.  Individual members of each party bought inexpensive party membership cards as proud proof of membership – and such cards were usually renewable annually. Members attended party meetings at their own expense at all levels, and did not expect money from their party or party leaders. Persons who got elected or appointed to public positions on the platform of their party paid into the coffers of their party an agreed small percentage of their salaries from those positions. Rich members might donate large sums of money to their party, and a government controlled by a party might employ its power to find money for the party, but even the smallest individual member was able to enjoy the pride that he was one of the persons financially supporting his party’s existence and strength. Parties had executive committees at local, state and national levels, and such bodies were respected within the party. Parties also had independent party financial accounts, as well as party secretariats, and paid party officials earning their salaries directly from the party accounts.  Party constituencies responsibly nominated their candidates for elections to all levels of government. All these contribute to making political parties democratic in their structure and activities, to making party leaders respectful and responsive to party members, and to making governance democratic.

    Change must include a return to this kind of sanity. The party of change must not only conscientiously organize and run itself along these norms, it must promote the establishment of these norms as the legally binding standard for political parties in our country. It must also commit itself to promote strict laws and regulations directed at making Nigeria’s politics responsible, oriented towards ideas and serious debates, and respectful of law, order and public peace. It must also commit itself to legally and truly eliminating from Nigerian politics such destructive practices as the use of thugs in politics, the amassing of armies of thugs by politicians, and the payment of citizens for attendance in political meetings. And it must advocate for legal provision for regional parties that choose to focus attention on the development of their particular regions.

    Parties of change like this have been done before in Nigeria, and can be done again. Intrinsically, the pre-independence political parties (AG, NCNC, NPC, NEPU, etc) were, to varying extents, parties of change, parties with ideas and programmes of development, parties under pressure to show that they could develop their country better than the British had been doing, parties which, to varying degrees, tried to organize and operate as parties of the people. To varying extents, these parties generated serious development and progress in their different regions of Nigeria in the 1950s. These progressive tendencies were strongest in the Western Region and in the Action Group which originated in the Western Region – part of the reason for his being that such progressive traditions had been well established from ancient times in the political life of the Yorubas of the Western Region. Also the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) founded in 1978, was a big improvement on the progressivism of the AG. Even though the UPN suffered hostility from the military dictatorship of the years before the 1979 elections, the UPN was phenomenally successful at mobilizing membership and support all over Nigeria because of its thoughtful development programmes and its well-known sincerity. And then, though the UPN was robbed of success at the presidential election of 1979, it easily swept the South-west, and it gave to the states of the South-west the highest quality of governance and development in Nigeria in 1979-83.

    In country after country in today’s world, parties of this kind have been known to change the directions of their countries astoundingly for the better. In Ghana, in the years of Jerry Rawlings’ second coming (as a civilian politician elected as president in 1991), his most important gift to his country was that he reorganized his ruling party and his country’s politics along these lines – and that is when Ghana began to emerge from disorder and poverty into the sustained progress that the world is commending today. Lee Kwan Yew, the man who pulled Singapore out of abject poverty and made her “Asia’s success model” in only a few years in the late 1960s, achieved his miracle by first reordering his party and his country’s politics in these ways. Korea was devastated and split in two (North and South) by the Korean War of the 1950s. After some more years of uncertainty, South Korea bravely reorganized its political life along these lines, and it is therefore a successful country today. In contrast, North Korea chose a communist dictatorship, and it is therefore still a desperately poor country – a country that is trying to divert attention from its internal hardships by rowdily threatening the peace of the world. And yet others are Slovakia and the Czech Republic, after these two peacefully agreed in 1991 to dissolve the joint country of Czechoslovakia into which European powers had forced them in 1918. By organizing their political lives sensibly along these lines, the two countries are among the most successful economies in Europe today.

    The emotional support for a party like this is potentially overwhelming today in Nigeria. In the disaster facing Nigeria, there are countless Nigerians, high and low, who would support serious and sincere efforts to save their country. Most Nigerians are shocked, embarrassed and pained by the sordid poverty, corruption, confusion and instability of their naturally rich country, and the irresponsibility and rapacity of their country’s leaders. When the aged statesman, Maitama Sule, recently called for a revolution, he was speaking for most Nigerians. The critical population mass exists for an invincible mass movement for grabbing control of Nigeria from those who see politics as a means of amassing personal wealth and those whose mission in Nigerian politics is to impose and expand their own ethnic nation’s domination over Nigeria.  Very many prominent Nigerians demand restructuring of the Nigerian federation so that Nigeria may become efficient for development and for harmony among Nigerian peoples. Many of these are warning that delay in restructuring could destroy Nigeria. Most Nigerians believe that widening regional autonomies (to empower each section of Nigeria to develop its resources and curb poverty among its people) could bring to an end even the most extreme demands for secession.  The masses of Nigeria’s unemployed youths, the millions of Nigerians who are poor, hungry and destitute, the majority of Nigerians who hunger for basic safety and security and who daily suffer from failures of electricity, clean water, and public administrative services, are desperate for change. The door seems wide open for a true party of change.