Obafemi Awolowo identified the greed of the Nigerian educated elite as the source of our nation’s nightmare. Ibrahim Magu, in an attempt to force our educated elite to toe the path of honour, like his predecessors, Nuhu Ribadu,  Farida Waziri and  Ibrahim Lamorde, was framed up, disgraced and humiliated out of office. Last week, the courts upheld his honour. His triumph I think has once more validated Awo’s thesis that our institutions, the executive, legislature, judiciary and the press are not the problem but our educated elite that operate them.

Magu was defiant to the end. “I have no fear in my DNA”, he had told our educated parasitic elite, adding “The EFCC’s motto is ‘Nobody is above the law’ “We don’t chase innocent people, but thieves of state resources. We have reached a level where nobody can stop us in the fight against corruption.” Although they got him at the end but not without a fight with President Buharis’s loyal gate keepers, state governors, our national legislative houses of deals, the judiciary that serves none but itself and of course a compromised media that instead of its constitutional duty of holding the powerful to account, celebrate men with feet of clay.

As it has now turned out, the president’s men including Lawal Daura and his DSS , Abubakar Malami and his NBA, Senate President Bukola Saraki and his like-mind senators  that hounded Magu out of office were driven more by their  interest in how recovered looted resources were distributed as well as malice.

Nuhu Ribadu in spite of 15million pounds alleged bribery attempt had insisted on Ibori’s prosecution for money laundering. Magu, as head of the EIU, spearheaded his investigation as well as the  role of his friend, former Kwara State governor and serving senator, Bukola Saraki, in the collapse of Societe Generale Bank of Nigeria.

In 2007, with Obasanjo out of government and Umaru Yar’Adua who was largely sponsored with Delta State resources by Ibori, in the saddle, Ibori influenced the demotion of Ribadu by the Police Service Commission, chased him out of town and replaced with a candidate chosen by Ibori.

Magu was also arrested, detained and suspended from the police for several months without salary and eventually transferred out of EFCC allegedly for illegally keeping case files of top politicians being investigated by EFCC. He was later rehabilitated by President Jonathan who transferred him back to EFCC.

Magu was appointed by President Buhari as acting chair of the EFCC on November 9, 2015. For five months, the senate refused to screen him. And when finally the senate did, as a result of pressure from civil society groups, twice, Magu’s candidacy was rejected.

Read Also: Magu retired before promotion was approved – Dingyadi

Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) believed the senate seem to have acted mala fide by picking and choosing the least favourable DSS report to reject Magu’s nomination”. Itse Sagay insisted “Since Nuhu Ribadu left, we have not had a man with such sterling qualities as Ibrahim Magu”. Those arguments did not stop Dino Melaye from announcing that Magu failed integrity test, quoting from one of the two contradictory letters from the Department of State Services (DSS)  alleging “Magus’s accommodation was not paid for from the commission’s finances but by one Umar Mohammed, a retired Air Commodore, a questionable businessman”.

Magu continued his work in acting capacity but not without opposition from NBA.  A “few months after the commission, in unprecedented fashion, arraigned some senior lawyers for corruption”, NBA’s President,  Abubakar Mamoud started canvassing for the withdrawal of the prosecutorial powers of the EFCC. But Magu insisted a “Bar populated or directed by people perceived to be rogues and vultures cannot play the role of priests in the temple of justice.”

He reminded Mamoud that he as “the federal government appointed prosecuting counsel in the trial of ex-Delta State governor, James Ibori, at the Federal High Court, Asaba, bungled the case which EFCC lost in questionable circumstances while the same ingredients from that case were used to fetch Ibori a 13-year jail term in London”.

Magu also informed Nigerians that the NBA president “was also the commission’s counsel in the appeal against the infamous perpetual injunction from arrest and prosecution by former Rivers State governor, Peter Odili, which was still pending before the Court of Appeal in Port Harcourt’, eight years after it was filed.

Then Magu took the battle to  all those who allegedly shared ‘Dasukigate’ slush fund including Tompolo: N13billion, Dokpesi: N2.1billion, Bafarawa: N4.6b for spiritual purposes, Iyorchia Ayu: N350m, Odili and Jim Nwobodo: N100m each Bode George: $30,000 and  Chief Olu Falae:N100m, Alhaji Tanko Yakassai’s N63m and Obanikoro and Fayose’s N4.745billion to prosecute Ekiti and Osun elections etc.

After five years of heroic battle with power and principalities behind corruption in Nigeria, Magu like his predecessors was disgraced out of office with a false claim that Pastor Emmanuel Omale of the Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministry, and his wife, Deborah laundered N573 million on his behalf  by using the said fund to buy a property for Magu in Dubai.

But the truth came out with Justice Halilu’s October 4 judgment. Following  bank’s admission that “the purported N573 million was wrongly reflected as credit entry into Divine Hand of God Prophetic Ministry’s account by its reporting system”, the court awarded the sum of N540.5 million as cost to Omale “for incalculable damage to his, reputation, his wife and their church within and outside the country”.

Magu’s travails and triumph is a call on our educated elite to look at themselves in the mirror.

Mad soldiers on the long bridge

It is bad enough that reconstruction of Lagos-Ibadan express way that took less than three years when first constructed, had taken PDP and Fashola and his APC 24 years with the end of travellers’ nightmare still not in sight.  On Thursday October 3, I spent about three hours between Punch and Kara Market. As we approach Kara, a young soldier had directed a car ahead of me to park on one side of the bridge, apparently because the driver hesitated a bit when asked to stop.  He then came over to me and with a wave of his right hand asked me to move. In another 30 yards, it was the same gridlock and I queued behind a trailer. For the next 20 minutes, it was the same standstill. And getting to my side while walking down to join his other three soldiers, he looked at me and shouted “Old man you did not listen to me”. Before I could say anything, he started using the butt of his gun to hit my side mirror.  He then used his hands to pull it out, smashing it on the bridge as he walked away triumphantly while everyone watched in disbelief.

What went through my mind was that the young soldier was probably on drug, depressed or an impersonator if not an armed robber. I believe Raji Fashola, as a responsive and resourceful former governor of Lagos understands why ill-tempered soldiers should not be deployed to carry out duties for which they were not trained.

But we now know President Buhari, like most soldiers that fought wars has a mind-set, believing he knows what the people want without asking them. This probably explains his opposition to state policing. Yet, the few  available federal police officers when not following wives of Chinese construction workers to fish market, carrying bags and umbrellas for wives of LGA chairmen, are protecting rich Yahoo boys or musicians while assaulting jealous husbands of married women they take interest in at night clubs. Everywhere we turned, there is absence of governance.

As the battle for 2023 draws near, Igbo political leaders, the ever-flirtatious beautiful bride of Nigerian politics that often behave like “a wife with five husbands” and their chauvinistic shrewd Fulani suitors, have started to do what they do best-polluting the environment with toxic diatribes.

It started with last week’s declaration by secretary of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide, Mazi Okechukwu Isuguzoro, that “Nigeria will not be secure and united unless an Igbo president emerges”. He went on to single out “the North as the bastion of ethnic and religious politics”. A denunciation by Northern Elders Forum’s Director, (Publicity and Advocacy), Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, who took exception to what he considered as Ohanaeze’s threat and blackmail of the north swiftly followed. Admonishing ‘Igbo leaders and elders to show maturity and leadership while marketing their Igbo candidate’, he was of the opinion that ‘if any group is known to play ethnic and religion politics, it is the Igbo’.

But if it will be of any relief, let me remind the warring fair-weather couple, that history finds both guilty. And the facts: In the December1954 eastern regional election, NCNC won 72 out of 84 seats while their NPC suitors won 84 of 92 seats in their own northern stronghold. In the 1954 November election to federal House of Representatives, NCNC won 32 of the 42 Eastern seats. Similarly, ethnicity and religion determined the outcome of the 1959 election with east and the north winning their strongholds without opposition.

The warring rivals are not only tarred with the same brush, both see Nigeria only as a commodity. What matter to them is what they can get out of Nigeria. Awolowo’s offence was that he provided alternative view on how Nigeria should be run.

Back in 1945, he had argued “Nigeria is not a nation; it is a mere geographical expression. There are no Nigerians in the same as there are ‘English’ ‘Welsh or ‘French”, adding, “There are various nationals or ethnical groups in the country…  There are as much difference between them as there is between Germans, English and Russians and Turks. Besides Their cultural background and social outlooks differ widely, and their indigenous political institutions have little in common. Their present stages of development vary…” He was therefore convinced that “the best constitution for such a diverse people is a federal constitution”.

But Zik and his group wanted a unitary system which will sustain Igbo internal colonization of the minority Ijaw, Efik, Ibibio Anang and other minority groups in the east. It will also allow Igbo citizens to freely carry their trading activities unhindered to any part of Nigeria. What Ahmadu Bello wanted was not different from what Zik wanted- a Nigeria the north can control. He therefore at the 1950 Ibadan conference insisted on 50% of member of the Federal legislative House. All the constitutional engineering that followed including those midwifed by northern military leaders sustained that advantage. The agenda is kept alive by new northern inheritors of power including Bauchi State governor, Bala Mohammed, Abubakar Malami, minister of justice and Shehu Garba, President Buhari’s spokesman who have come out to justify infiltration of southern forest reserves by foreign Fulani herdsmen.

Their rivalry got to a head after the outcome of the controversial 1962/63 census and the disputed 1964 election which convinced the Igbo that it can never acquire power by democratic means if we agree democracy is a game of numbers. The eastern leaders were believed to have lured the military into politics in January 1966. Those who claim it was not an Igbo-inspired coup should tell Nigerians why General Ironsi who surrounded himself with Igbo political advisers pursued Igbo agenda with his Decree 34 of 1966 which turned the country into a unitary state – a winner takes all position for Igbo that then controlled the federal bureaucracy and the military.

Read Also: Ethnic prejudices holding us back

The north seized the initiative from their Igbo rival in July 1966 and by 1967 the bitter rivalry fuelled by ethnicity and religion dovetailed into war between the north and the east with the west as onlookers since Gowon had acceded to Awolowo’s demand that non-Yoruba soldiers be withdrawn to forestall the east from being attacked from the west.

But the east was to drag Yoruba into the war, first by overrunning Mid-west which is culturally related to the Yoruba. Then the east determined to turn Yoruba land where they and their suitors started their mindless killings in January and July 1966, took the war to the west and were only stopped in Ore.

Unfortunately, in the battle for the soul of Nigeria by Igbo and their Fulani rivals, the interest of their people, viewed only as instruments for winning elections, hardly featured. Thus In 1979, Igbo leadership stampeded ordinary Igbo voters to NPN, a re-incarnation of first republic NPC with Ojukwu, the Igbo war hero returning from exile to join NPN. In 1983, 1993, 1999, 2007, Igbo political leadership found their northern suitors irresistible.

After jointly ruling the country between 1959 and 2015 (Alabi Isama: The Tragedy of Victory), their baleful legacies include 10 million of out of school children, bandits, kidnappers and herdsmen terrorists and millions of Igbo boys and girls shipped to urban centres of the country as street hawkers of imported goods. The states of ‘the beautiful bride and their crafty suitors’ in the north and southeast remain a scorched land where anarchy has forced their children to seek refuge in Lagos or foreign land.

Today, the battle cry of the ‘Obi-dient’ crowd, the ‘Atikulates’ and the ‘Yoruba educated illiterates’ is ‘we want to take back our country’. But what country and through which instrumentality?

Let us start from the Yoruba educated illiterates. Awo back in 1947 had spoken of Yoruba “barristers, physicians, teachers, clerks, skilled labourers and artisans, journalist organizational leaders, out of which only very small percentage are politically conscious” (Coleman Nigeria background to Nationalism pp 141-142). Today, 75 years after, we can add many Yoruba professors, PhD holders, journalists human right activists’ lawyers who remain noise makers or “Lagos mobs’ as the imperialist powers called them.

Obi, a perfect example of Igbo beautiful bride, flirted with APGA, PDP, before finding Labour Party irresistible few weeks back. He has given no indication he intends to change from the ways of his fathers. Except for his Yoruba promoter, Pa Ayo Adebanjo, he has never spoken of restructuring. That, in any case will amount to class suicide.

Atiku’s forbears in NPC nurtured the Kano terrorist body, called ‘MAHAUKATA’ (madmen) that in 1953 killed 40 in Kano to prevent Akintola of AG from lecturing northern youths on democracy. As Obasanjo’s vice president, 13 northern governors sent northern youths for indoctrination under Osama Bin Laden in Sudan and many returned to form the nucleus of today’s insurgents’ groups in the north. His celebrated book on restructuring talks of devolving power to the current unwieldy 36 state ad 74 LGAs which fitted perfectly into his great grandfather’s paradigm.

To avoid ‘Path to Nigerian Freedom”, a few mischief makers are canvassing ‘citizenship’ in a country where an Igbo Bishop of universal Catholic Church from Anambra was rejected by Igbo people of Imo State. And while citing the American experience, they forget to add that all the indigenous people of our over 377 ethnic nationalities, the real owners of Nigeria will first have to be killed as the invading white criminals did to native Indians of America that owned their land.

What “geographically, historically and ethnically, by custom, tradition and practice, Lagos belongs to the Western Region was settled during the Ibadan 1950 Constitutional Conference” (Lord Milverton.) “Payne, Mabogunje, Forde, Akinsemoyin, the Idejo chiefs etc., according to Dr. P. D. Cole agreed that the Aworis of Isheri were the first inhabitants of Lagos. Olofin, a legendary Yoruba whose descendants are the Idejo landowning white cap chiefs founded Lagos”. Addo, Ashipa’s son from his Benin wife, a good mediator and a peaceful envoy from Benin, was only invited by Olofin, following Ashipa’s death, to fill his father’s position. (P. D. Cole: Modern and Traditional Elites in the Politics of Lagos)

Lagosians like their fellow Yoruba compatriots are social and therefore very receptive to outsiders. This unfortunately has led to serial betrayals by visiting fortune seekers who lust over their land. First it was the British who initially came to trade in pepper and other items. By 1840 they had turned Lagos to a slave port. In 1861, after obtaining a treaty of the cession of Lagos from King Dosunmu under duress in a typical act of banditry, they drove away Kosoko, his successor in order to take possession of Lagos.

Lagos by 1872 had become part of colony of Gold Coast with her resources coming under William Macgregor and Walter Egerton. From a colony in 1886, it became part of the colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1906. It acquired a new status as the capital of Nigeria in 1914 where by 1925 those born within it were no more subjected to the laws of the protectorate.

As prospect of self-rule drew near, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and his Igbo political elite were scheming to become the new colonisers. At a period, C.C. Mojekwu was leading a protest by non-Onitsha Ibos for representation in Onitsha Town Council, Zik, described by Richard Sclar as “persuasive teacher, an effective propagandist, an astute political tactician, a rugged antagonist, was as the adopted son of Herbert Macaulay and leader of NCNC for a decade (1944-1953), winning election all over the west while Mbonu, another Igbo man was a deputy Mayor of Lagos.

What truncated Zik and his group’s plans was the NCNC intra-party crisis which led to the suspension of Dr Olorunnibe who in turn as one of the four elected Lagos NCNC members to the legislative council refused to step down for Zik. The crisis forced Zik to retrace his way back to the east where he replaced Eyo Ita , an Efik minority as premier.

But Zik’s supporters did not forgive Lagos. Dr. Mbadiwe, not long after, moved a motion to turn Lagos to a federal territory, a motion ignored by Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa. Then Zik’s NCNC Igbo supporters taking a cue from Mbadiwe coined a song “Lagos was no man’s land” to which Dr Olorunnibe and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, NCNC supporters retorted “Oponu alailero to ni gedegbe l’Eko wa” (meaning: unthinking fools who claimed Lagos is floating in the air without a supporting pillar). Zik with the support of Ahmadu Bello finally had his pound of flesh during the 1957 London Conference when Lagos became a federal territory despite protest from Awo and his group.

The selective killing of eight northern senior military officers on January 29, 1966 and the retaliatory July 29, 1966 mindless hunting down of 33 Igbo military officers and the civil war that followed were all for the soul of Lagos. And when the war broke out, Lagos, repeatedly bombed by Biafra forces instead of northern towns where killing of Igbo took place during the pogrom and where the war was coming to the east, underscored the importance of Lagos to Ojukwu.  Because Lagos was Ojukwu’s big prize, he followed his troop’s Benin victory, with a letter to Col Victor Banjo promising to appoint him administrator of Yoruba country after her pacification while he, Ojukwu would decide who would become administrator of Lagos.

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And predictably, when Lagos, the coveted prize of the war between two fair-weather friends turned political foes, went to the north, after the war, successive Lagos Affairs ministers and administrators were all of northern extraction. There were Alhaji Ribadu, Mallam Yar’Adua, General Kontagora, Barnabas Gemade, General Adisa, and later Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, Brigadier Raji Rasaki and Mike Akhigbe. And their mandate appeared to be the sharing of Lagos’ priceless plots without a thought for those they routinely dismissed as shanty dwellers or squatters.

Lagos got little relief from the exit of their military colonisers who were immediately replaced by a comical group of Igbo young men who after acquiring great fortunes in Lagos set up a Biafra Radio where they issue out infantile tales of how Lagos with a population of about 189,000 when Igbo fortune seekers first came to Lagos from Enugu, Aba and Port Harcourt with population ranging between 3000, and 10,000 was a jungle developed by Igbo. For them, Sir Louis Ojukwu, Emeka Ojukwu’s father who was born in 1909 built Apapa Ports, constructed with taxes from Lagos between 1908 and 1912.  They feed the uninformed listeners of their Radio Biafra with tales of how federal funds built Lagos State, unable to make a distinction between Western Region which extended to Mushin and Oyingbo, limiting the federal territory to Lagos Island, Ikoyi, and Victoria Island. They claim that with the population of Igbo in Lagos and their control of Lagos economy, they should be ready to ensure the next governor of Lagos comes from either Anambra or Delta states.

Sadly, since many of them they don’t read, it is impossible to remind them about how Ahmadu Bello once counselled Zik on the imperative of understanding other people’s cultures. And unfortunately, when Oba Rilwan Akiolu, the Eleko of Eko in the run up to the 2015 election warned the Igbos to respect the sensibilities of their host communities, he was viciously attacked by angry Igbo social media anarchists.

It is hoped the aspiring new colonisers will be humbled enough to learn from our recent history. Yoruba by nature are federalists. For wanting what was good for them for others, especially the northern minorities which constituted about 48% of northern population and the eastern minorities which constituted about 39% of the region, Tafawa Balewa and Dr Azikiwe imprisoned Awolowo, truncated development of the West and created Midwest Region which was less than 24% of the West ignoring violent agitations for self-actualisation in their respective regions.

As it later turned out, those who sowed the wind reaped the whirlwind. It was not the Yoruba that drove the Igbos from Lagos or other parts of Nigeria in 1967. Yoruba only welcomed them back with open hands after war with accumulated rents on their properties even at a period their properties on Ijaw Port Harcourt land were declared abandoned properties.  Similarly, Yoruba did not blame the Igbo leadership for their role in the 1993 election debacle which led to the death of MKO Abiola in prison for winning a pan-Nigeria mandate in spite of Igbo votes. Again, it was not the Yoruba that drove them back to the east in the guise of going for new yam festival. If anything, Yoruba received them back to Lagos with open hands when their fellow Igbo compatriots at home chased them back as a result of scarcity of everything including salt.

Our recent experiences have shown that disrespect for the cultures of host communities by fortune seekers have consequences. If Igbo culture celebrates disloyalty because Igbo ‘do not understand the gods of their host communities’ (Chinua Achebe in No Longer at Ease), Yoruba culture expects a beneficiary to share in the tribulations of his benefactor in the period of adversity.

History often repeats itself. The trending videos of Obi’s angry supporters threatening expulsion of anyone who fails to vote for their principal from the east, mob action against Tinubu’s supporters in Alaba Market in Lagos added to shameless assault on the person of Asiwaju Tinubu through hate songs by Seadog confraternity, during their public procession are all but sad reminder of the past when Lagos Igbo urban immigrants were mobilized to buy off all the cutlasses in Lagos market in readiness to battle their Yoruba hosts, labelled enemies of Igbo by leaders they looked up to for direction.

Perhaps we again need to return to history to remind our angry youths where we are coming from and how the seed of today’s mutual suspicion was sown by self-serving Igbo political leaders especially since the late president, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and Peter Obi share some parallels.

They were both beneficiaries of Lagos benevolence. It was in Lagos that they had their professional, financial and political breakthrough. The former, fresh from Ghana, first “elezikified’ the Nigerian press in Lagos before establishing his newspaper chain across Nigeria cities. The latter started as Alaba trader graduating to importer of everything including wines before becoming a bank owner.  They both built their political fortunes in Lagos as leader of Igbo urban immigrants that needed a spokesman in a stranger’s land. They both freely deploy rhetoric to confuse their largely uninformed Igbo youths and unquestioning Nigerians.

For his oratory and brilliance, Zik was loved by the Yoruba. As an adopted son of Herbert Macaulay, he could do no wrong among the Lagos white cap chiefs and Imams who saw him as their son. Although NCNC was a Yoruba party with only one Igbo man during its inauguration, he became an unchallenged leader of NCNC after Herbert Macaulay’s death. And before the party was hijacked by his Igbo supporters, Zik was winning all elections in Lagos, Ibadan, Ilesha, Akure and Ondo among other Yoruba towns.

Like most young men of his generation. Awo used to follow Zik to his lecture venues.  But he was the first to discover Zik was a fake god in spite of his rhetoric and endless railing against the imperialists. Awo also discovered that sometimes nationalism may not be driven by altruism.

He gave reasons in his autobiography. Zik was using his paper to promote interest of Igbos while downplaying achievement of others especially Yoruba. His devious role in the collapse of Nigerian Youth Movement after fraudulently labelling Awo a tribalist for supporting Ernest Ikoli, an Ijaw easterner from today’s Bayelsa against Oba Akinsanya, his fellow Ijebu man. He went on to form Egbe Omo Oduduwa in London in 1945 along with the Akereles, Ayo Rosijis and Akintola Williams..

Unlike Awo, it took the Yoruba Lagos aristocrats of the period, including Sir Adeyemo Alakija, Dr Akinola Maja, Sir Kofo Abayomi, Chief Bode Thomas, Chief H. O. Davies and Dr Akanni Doherty, among others, much longer time to see clearly. In 1948 however, they launched Egbe Omo Oduduwa in Lagos around the same period similar group like Jamiyyar Mutanen Arewa (Northern People’s Congress) was formed in the north.

Zik and his supporters’ attack on the Egbe promoters was vicious. The West African Pilot editorial September 8, 1948 said “Henceforth, the cry must be one of battle against the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, its leaders at home and abroad, uphill and down dale. In the streets of Nigeria and in the residences of its advocates. The Egbe Omo Oduduwa is the enemy of Nigeria. It must be crushed to the earth. There is no going back until the fascist organization of Sir Adeyemo Alakija has been dismembered”. This was followed by physical assault on the persons and the leaders of the Egbe and damage to houses and properties of some of them”. (Awo: The Autobiography of Obafemi Awolowo page 171].

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Then followed Zik’s Freudian slip during his 1949 presidential address to Ibo State Union, formed since 1943. According to Zik: “It would appear the God of Africa has specially created the Ibo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of the ages…The martial prowess of the Ibo nation at all stages of human history has enabled them not only to conquer others but also to adapt themselves to role of preserver… the Ibo nation cannot shirk its responsibility. He went on to complain about Ibo non-representation at the executive council and complain Ibo taxation was being used to develop other areas.

That was the impetus Yoruba political elite needed to shift their support to Awo and his Action Group in 1952 thereby frustrating Zik’s attempt of becoming the premier of the West. Of course, the Yoruba did not regret it as the West became the pacesetter between 1952 and 1959. But for preventing Igbo internal colonialism, Awo and Yoruba were labelled tribalists by Igbo political leaders who tolerated no opposition in their own strongholds. The fallout was that Awo did not get any support from the east where his helicopter was stoned by fanatical Zik supporters during the 1959 election.

The north at independence constituted five–eighths of the entire territory of Nigeria with 56 per cent of the entire population. Their system according to Awolowo, “was feudal and autocratic; at best oligarchic and authoritarian and completely antithetical to liberal tradition of the Western Region and egalitarian beliefs of the Eastern Region”. He believed “the problem of Nigeria “cannot be solved until the problem of the north has been solved”. His solution was the west and the east with some support from middle belt taking over power.

But greed-driven Igbo political elite preferred an NPC and NCNC coalition. While ordinary Igbo on whose back they rode to power got nothing, Igbo elite secured all important appointments in Balewa’s government from finance, to external affairs, agriculture, control of University of Lagos, University of Ibadan, Yaba College of Technology, Nigerian Airways Nigeria Railways forcing Akintola to ask Ikejiani:  Iketaani, Ikerinani, where is the one for Yoruba? (Meaning Igbo shared all available positions leaving nothing for Yoruba).

The blame for secession and civil war was put on Awo and Yoruba and not Ojukwu and Igbo leaders who seceded with 16 riffles (Ojukwu) while declaring “no power in Africa can subdue us.”  Of course that was also an excuse to justify Igbo NPP’s ill-advised coalition with NPN with Ojukwu who later became Abacha’s ambassador to Europe to de-market MKO Abiola returning from exile to eat with his former enemies. It is on record the 1979 alliance like that of 1959 collapsed over sharing of spoils of office.

For the same reasons, Igbo political elite mobilized their people to support NRC’s Bashir Tofa in the 1993 election and when MKO Abiola won a landslide despite securing only one Igbo state, leading Igbo politicians joined Babangida in annulling the election.

In 1999, Igbo political elite rejected the Yoruba candidate and supported Obasanjo who also rewarded them abundantly with positions after his victory. It was all about the interest of Igbo political leaders.

As a heterogeneous society, Igbo elite consensus with the northern political leaders with whom they share a common worldview of exploiting the innermost fears of their people for political gain is not unhealthy for democracy. But conscious of the cost of how past fraudulent claims and political subterfuge have haunted us for over 70 years, I don’t think abusing Yoruba and blaming their leaders for Igbo leadership failure is helpful for Peter Obi who, I am not sure, can freely campaign in Anambra where he ruled for eight years and where eight security officers made the supreme sacrifice as ransom for Senator Ifeanyi Ubah’s life last week.

 

 

Parliament is the living and breathing instrument of democracy’. King Charles III

The beauty of parliamentary democracy was in full display last Monday at the London Westminster Hall during the presentation of addresses to His Majesty, King Charles III by speakers of the House of Commons and the Upper House, populated by their Right Honourable Lords Spiritual and Temporal.  Adding the event to the seamless transition, from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss, some days earlier, only brought the past to pain. But for the conspiracy of our governing political elite, our nation at independence had the potential to achieve such a smooth transition.

Since it is unlikely many of our angry youths who hardly read anything would to take time off watching ‘Big Brother’ – (one more of evidence of collapsed of values we once held dear as a people), they will probably not be able to appreciate how British politicians and their informed youths exhibit their ownership of their nation despite lack of consensus on many issues, including the monarchy and Scotland’s quest for divorce from a union dating back to the 17th century.

I sympathise with our largely uninformed angry youths who have been programmed by human rights promoters of lawlessness and anarchy,  the media owned by those who pretend not to know the distinction between rights and obligations to community, and politicians like  Senator Dino Melaye who once said he  was “in politics to ensure Nigerian youths get their fair share of the national resources” to believe government is the enemy when in truth government is their only dependable ally in the battle against private owners of resources whose only interest is presiding over an empire of slaves.

For our angry youths  who are currently being fed with falsehood by politicians and a segment of the media operating below the level of society, that they could take over their country on the social media and on the street, I think a brief journey through memory will help them to see themselves in the mirror.

But let us start by assuring our dear angry youths that the fault is not in our stars. Indeed a solid foundation for our democratization process was laid by the departing colonial power just as she did in most of her 54 commonwealth nations that emerged from the ashes of her collapsed empire. If what today defines our parliamentarians is a culture of sharing looted resources of conquered territories as against service, commitment patriotism as we saw in Westminster last Monday, the fault is in our greed-driven political elite.

First, our new inheritors of power had no abiding faith in the democratization process. They saw it only as an avenue to take power. It therefore did not take time for them to unleash a coordinated assault on institutions of democracy starting with leader of opposition and his Action Group party, the supreme court, the parliament, the office of head of state occupied by the queen and finally the federal arrangement.

Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s NCNC and Ahmadu Bello’s Northern People’s Congress , as coalition partners with majority in the parliament,  started by compromising the integrity of the judiciary. And when the Nigerian supreme court ruling was overturned by the Privy Council of London, instead of showing remorse for their betrayal of the nation, driven by hatred for the opposition leader, they coerced the parliament into passing a retroactive law to upstage the Privy Council.

The next victim was the office of the head of state occupied by the Queen. The 1963 Republican Constitution, the first to be presided over by Nigerians without colonial masters’ supervision replaced the Queen as Head of state with Dr Azikiwe who became titular president and commander in chief of armed forces even when the real power to mobilise the army resided in the Prime Minister Balewa, with the dissolution of the Judicial Service Commission took over control of judiciary. With the emasculation of the parliament and the judiciary, the coalition partners came up with an emergency constitutional provision. Awolowo was framed up for treasonable felony under the new emergency law, his British defence lawyer, a member of Nigerian Bar Association was barred by Shehu Shagari, the interior minister from entry into Nigeria and subsequently jailed for 10 years.

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The duo used their new positions to serve self rather than serve Nigeria. Unlike what was witnessed in the combined sittings of House of Commons and House of Lords where accomplished members of the House of the Lords deployed their past experiences to serve the British society and where the Queen managed the diversity of the four nations making up the United Kingdom by respecting the values of all men of faith and even men of no faith, the president and the prime minister betrayed the nation.

With the opposition out of the way, the battle for the soul of Nigerian between Igbo and Hausa/Fulani became vicious. In the disputed 1962/63 census results, settled in favour of the north by a compromised Nigerian judiciary, Zik could not resist taking side with his people. It was the same with the massively rigged 1964 federal election which led to constitutional crisis after Zik, pandering to the demands of his people, refused to call on the winner to form the government.

The zero-sum struggle for power by the head of state and his prime minister was what brought the military in to politics in January and July 1966 and eventually plunged the nation into 33 months civil war.

It is on record that when Ironsi emerged head of state in January 1966, he was manipulated by Igbo political leaders to replace our federal system with a unitary system through Decree 34 of 1966. The control of power by the military of northern extraction after the July 1966 coup, through other successive military coups from 1975 to 1999 is responsible for our current constitution which with 68 items on the exclusive list is only federal in name.

What we have today under Buhari where the north controls every important public office is a sad reminder of 1959 to 1966 and 2011 to 2015 when Igbo also controlled most of the important positions in government.

From the above, it is hoped our angry youths will come to understand that governments including the Buhari administration overwhelmed by the mess left behind by their fathers, is not necessarily the enemy of youths. An interrogation of the past will also allow our angry youths threatening to take back their country come to terms with the truth about who in fact sold their country for a pot of porridge and decide whether to return to our golden period of parliamentary bliss or stick to this unworkable structure put together by hypocrites who claim to be Nigerians first before the representatives of their people.

And finally, it is hoped that after seeing themselves in the mirror, our angry youths as leaders of tomorrow will take a cue from the youths of Western Region of the 50s by returning to the library, to plan a pathway for tomorrow.

The recently concluded Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) Citizens Summit on National Integration, aimed at fostering national integration, rebuilding peace and strengthening security, was a welcome development. The summit held in collaboration with over 70 organisations was rounded off with a two-day conference designed “to bridge the widening trust gap between the leaders and the citizens, as well as amongst the citizens, through promotion of national integration and enhancement of cross-country peaceful co-existence.”

With social dislocations which find expression in Boko Haram operations in the north east, herdsmen, bandits and kidnappers controlling the northwest and middle belt, IPOB terrorising its own people in the east in its campaign for a sovereign state of Biafra, and with the 2023 election increasingly taking the form of an ethnic war among social media savvy youths without a sense of history, I think the summit couldn’t have come at a better time.

The intervention was also timely because of recent experiences across the world where crises of national integration have led to the disintegration of nations like the old USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, responsible for the current uneasy relationship between Britain, Spain and their ethnic groups, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh that seceded from it, and the ongoing ethnic wars in Sudan, Chad and Zaire etc.

But the problem of national integration particularly poses a greater threat to stability in Nigeria as well as the rest of Africa because of the nature and texture of the colonial state where diverse groups at different levels of cultural development were merged without consultations just to satisfy the economic interest of the metropolitan powers.

To make matters worse, African new inheritors of power who in the absence of a capitalist hegemonic class discovered they could easily fill the vacuum since access to political power meant access to economic power, were determined to retain the colonial state as inherited.

In a few areas, including Nigeria, where efforts were made to mitigate ethnic rivalry through the creation of a federal framework in which regions representing the interest of ethnic nationalities formed the building block, our new inheritors of power, desperate to retain the state as a dominant force for exploitation as it was under colonial rule, destroyed the regions,  replacing them with the current unwieldy 36 states and the federal government arbitrarily created 774 local government areas.

In other words, just as the colonial state as a dominant force of exploitation for solving social problems of the metropolitan government, our successive inheritors of power, whether under the military or civilian, in the names of NPN, PDP and APC, rape the country to satisfy their own greed.

However, the first republic stood out because of national integration or the cohesiveness within regional social groups. Because of this they were able to serve the interest of their people without prejudice to the development of interpersonal and intergroup cohesion and feelings among Nigerians. As Awolowo once observed, you cannot be a good Nigerian if you are not first a good representative of your people.

While regional leaders like Awolowo and his group implemented a free education programme, set up the University of Ife, established housing and industrial estates, the first television in Africa, the first skyscraper, the cocoa house and liberty stadium etc. self-proclaimed Nigerian leaders like Obasanjo, who detested being called a Yoruba leader, and Atiku Abubakar as president and vice president while still in office, established privately owned fee-paying schools, including universities, built a private presidential library while the national library they started remains an abandoned project.

Similarly, the cohesiveness of the ruling northern political elite of the first republic led to the establishment of the biggest business conglomerate in Africa by Ahmadu Bello, Ahmadu Bello University, and sending of brilliant northern youths, be they Christians or Muslims, to the best universities in the world.

Unfortunately, today the enduring legacies of the hypocritical northern political elite serving Nigeria instead of their people on whose back they rode to power, include the north east under Boko Haram siege, north west and the middle belt region made ungovernable by herdsmen terrorists, bandits and kidnappers.

Of course, unlike the first republic when the Igbo leaders served their own people, what we today have are Igbo Nigerian politicians eating with ten fingers in Abuja while the east is abandoned to IPOB who in the name of quest for self-actualisation wages war against the people it pretends to liberate.

Unfortunately, the intervention of NIPR, despite its good intentions, addressed only the symptoms of our crisis of nation building instead of the fundamental issues. One clear evidence of this was the attention of notable keynote speakers at the presentation of reports of the Zonal Dialogue Series, plenary, syndicate sessions and other activities on our army of angry and frustrated youths, failure of leadership, ethnic stereotyping and profiling, corruption and unacceptable behaviour of Nigerians.

The problem with our self-serving political ruling elite is their readiness to play the ostrich if only that allows them to avoid the bitter truth. They outrightly rejected demands by victims of Niger Delta oil pollution for special attention just as they rejected the demand by many Nigerians that revenue allocation be based on derivation as was the case in the first republic.  Ex-President Jonathan under whose government Soludo, a former CBN governor, declared that “Our public finance is hemorrhaging to the point that estimated over N30tn is missing, or stolen, or unaccounted for, or simply mismanaged,” said, ‘stealing government money is not corruption.’

And despite Okonjo Iweala’s 2013 admission, in an interview with Bloomberg in Abuja, that “We estimate total loss at over 300,000 barrels per day,” the London Economist’s 2016 damning report that “no one knows how much oil Nigeria produces. If there were an authoritative figure, the truly horrifying scope of corruption would be exposed,” and the Nigerian Upstream Regulatory Petroleum Commission’s (NURPC) claim that Nigeria may have lost about 200 million barrels to organised theft in the first 11 months of 2021, prominent indigenes of Niger Delta insist that the federal government is the thief and not the people of Niger Delta.

Last week, as if to vindicate various wild claims, the federal government awarded a N48b pipeline surveillance contract to Government Ekpemupolo, a former leader of one of the Niger Delta militant groups fingered as being behind vandalisation of pipelines and placed on a government wanted list for about four years.

It is on record that under regionalism, ethnic leaders served their tribes without prejudice to an awareness of a common identity among Nigerians. Back then, the phrase “tribes and tongues may differ” in our national anthem was a true admission of our diversity at a time when an unaccompanied 12-year-old could take a train from Iddo, Lagos to Kaduna or Kano. Today under President Buhari, a hero of the war to keep Nigeria one and, Obasanjo, who claims to be Mr. Nigeria, adults, especially Christians, are afraid to travel to Kano by road.

Ethnicity, religion and other primordial tendencies are not antithetical to national integration. Our political elite that exploits them for easy access to political and economic power are the architects of disharmony and discord. And if for a moment they forgot where we derailed on our path to Nigeria’s greatness, they will at least remember that multi-ethnic societies like India, Canada and Britain which they periodically visit to seek medical attention, or have adopted as second homes, were built on the recognition of ‘cultural and ideological congruity and harmony among different groups.’

 

Suddenly, the 2023 election has become a tripartite tribal war between three Nigerian dominant ethnic groups. With the last-minute defection of Peter Obi from PDP to Labour Party, he was to become a rallying point for disillusioned Igbos, betrayed by PDP they had faithfully served for 22 years. To spite Igbos, PDP, in breach of its constitution, settled for Atiku Abubakar, notorious for shopping for presidential tickets from any party during every election season.

With prominent Igbo stalwarts of APGA and PDP defecting to join Obi, with millions of otherwise indifferent urban-based Igbo youths coming out for voter’s card registration across the nation, including Lagos where they unilaterally shut down Alaba market, and with Obi now hijacked by his obedient supporters, Obi has become the messiah Igbo had waited for since 1999.

That the PDP sacrificed the interests of the south-east and south-south that have always provided the winning votes for it, sometimes with the blood of their people, as Prof. Ise Sagay once said of Rivers, it was obvious Atiku is the adopted candidate of the ‘owners of Nigeria.’

The combination of events leading to the sudden emergence of Obi and Atiku as representatives of two of Nigerian dominant ethnic groups has inadvertently brought a change of fortune for Tinubu.

Here was a leader humiliated for seven years by the government he helped to install, bore scars of misplaced aggression of frustrated Nigerians who saw him as enabler and promoter of Buhari’s candidacy, with philosophical equanimity (with apologies to Ray Ekpu), and survived the evil intrigues of Buhari’s ‘loyal gate keepers’ and APC oligarchy by the fortuitous intervention of rebellion of 11 northern governors that placed the nation first during APC Abuja convention night of many knives.

If all this, including Tinubu’s audacity of ‘Yoruba lokan” (it is the turn of Yoruba), did not earn Tinubu the support of his hypocritical Yoruba fathers, who often observe their ‘Afenifere’ creed (love your neighbour as yourself) in reverse, the antisocial behavior of Obi’s obedient supporters, who unfortunately cannot articulate the nature of Nigeria’s problem, must have finally convinced other Yoruba sitting on the fence that since a part cannot be holier than the whole, it is impossible to impose their culture on the rest of the country.

From this stage, the narrative seems to change for Tinubu. First was the distorted history of Lagos by Igbo Area TV claiming, among other falsehoods, that Lagos is no man’s land, that Igbo has the highest population in Lagos and contribute 60% of its IGR, and that the next governor of Lagos must come from Anambra or Delta.

This was followed by a trending video of 89-year-old Tunde Oduwole, of ‘Project Nigeria,’ appealing to Ndigbo leaders to control their unruly youths, who after allegedly warning Tinubu not to campaign in the east, threaten to lynch anyone coming to campaign in Alaba market wearing Tinubu’s campaign vest. His declaration that Yoruba will not tolerate in their region ‘the nonsense going on in the south-east’ where elected governors shiver when IPOB militants cough was, of course, an appeal to Yoruba patriotism.

But, dear compatriots, there is nothing sinister about tribes being the building block for modern society. By nature, we are individuals and groups. And tribalism is the behaviours and attitudes that stem from strong loyalty to one’s own tribe or social group.

Europe, after two devastating tribal wars they falsely called world wars, discovered the nation state as well as modern democracy were inhibiting the freedom of individual and group identity. In response, they settled for a federal arrangement which ‘formally recognises groups’ identities as legitimate and autonomous participants in the political process.’

In Spain, we have the Basque, Galician, Castilian and Catalan. British 25 tribes coalesce into Northern Ireland, Wales, England and Scotland. Elsewhere in the world, Japan, China, and India celebrate their various tribes. The Jews and their Arab step brothers, bequeathed to the world the Abrahamic religion, science, arts and terrorism.

This was why the British vision for Nigeria, according to Oliver Stanley in 1920, was a “national self-government that secure to each separate people the right to maintain its identity, its individuality and its nationality, its own chosen form of government, which had been evolved for it by the wisdom and accumulated experiences of generation of its forbearers.” In line with this British vision, regionalism was put in place by Richards 1947 constitution while the 1954 Lyttleton ensured each tribe or group of tribes had powers over law and order, education, economic development etc. while Macpherson 1957 constitution consolidated everything.

But as the struggle for power became intensified by representatives of the dominant ethnic nationalities, tribes became instruments for political manipulation of the largely illiterate electorate in whose name the politicians falsely swear.

Ibibio State Union was formed in 1928, while Igbo State Union over which Zik presided as National President was formed in 1930. But when Egbe Omo Oduduwa was formed in London in 1943 by Awo and others, Zik saw a tribal association that must “be fought up hill and down dale’ all over Nigeria.” In the 1951 election to the western region house, Awolowo’s AG won by 45 seats to Zik’s NCNC’s 35. Awolowo was labelled by Zik and his supporters as a tribal leader who prevented him from becoming premier of West in 1952. They had nothing to say about the result in the east where Zik’s NCNC won by 64 seats to UNP’s 4.

In the 1954 federal election, AG in its Yoruba land won by 23 to NCNC’s 18, while in the same election, in the east, NCNC won its base by 32 to 3. Yet Igbo leaders did not see the beam in their own eyes.

The feeding of uninformed Igbo youths with falsehood is responsible for the mutual suspicion between ordinary Igbos and their Yoruba compatriots. This was why Awolowo, whose helicopter was stoned in Aba in 1998, scored just about 0.8% of Igbo votes, and why MKO Abiola won only one Igbo during his pan-Nigeria landslide victory, later annulled by Babangida, aided by leading Igbo politicians including Arthur Nzeribe, Chukwumerije, Walter Ofonagoro and Apamgbo.

Between 1999 and 2015, Igbo leaders, just as they did during the first and second republics, ate with their ten fingers under Obasanjo and Jonathan. Contracts for the second Niger bridge, dredging of River Niger, East-West Road, among others, were awarded but never executed.

In 2015, Tinubu mobilised the Yoruba for the victory of Buhari, who has remained overwhelmed by Nigeria’s challenges of nation building. But unlike Igbo leaders who pulled down the first and second republic governments over sharing of positions, Tinubu, who never participated in government or sought contract, patiently waited for his time.

But as soon as Tinubu declared interest in the 2023 presidential contest, he was labelled a traitor and tribal leader by Igbo leaders who wanted to reap where they did not sow. That was the impetus needed for Obi’s supporters to unleash a vicious attack on a leader who laid the foundation for the development of Lagos, where they today take refuge from the anarchy that has taken over the whole of the south-east, including Obi’s Anambra.

Now the die is cast. Exhibition of antisocial behaviour, which finds expression in abuse, intimidation, threat to use violence and utter disregard for the feelings and right of others by Obi’s obedient supporters, can only drive the Yoruba who are social, celebrate companionship, respect the feelings and protect the rights of others, towards making an informed choice between Obi and Tinubu in 2023.

The ongoing war, now six months, between the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the government remains intractable because of the incompetence of the warring parties. The duo of Ngige and Adamu are round pegs in square holes. ASUU, on the other hand, because its cause is right, thinks it can give what it does not have.

The primary role of egg heads is the preservation of civilisation. And this they do with their physical scientists caged in laboratories searching for what they have not lost, an endeavour that has yielded great dividends for humanity in forms of various inventions in engineering and medicine. Their counterparts in Social Sciences perform the same role by providing philosophical justification for religion, the opium of the poor, and economic model such as slavery, which also goes by other elegant names as capitalism and globalisation.

Finding itself in an unfamiliar territory, ASUU could not advance a good argument to support its just cause beyond bellyaching about lawmakers’ humongous salaries, President Buhari’s misapplication of funds, and massive corruption in the bureaucracy, all of which have no bearing on the underfunding of education.

Suddenly they want to be politicians without politicians’ temperament. I am not sure ASUU members can undress and engage in a brawl inside the market as recommended by Lamidi Adedibu, the late garrison commander of Ibadan politics. Given an opportunity to fix their own salaries, it is most unlikely university dons will corner 25 percent of the national budget. Above all, with all the bravado inside their campuses, I am not sure they will order the execution of their best friend over power struggle.

But ASUU, which hardly listens to other peoples’ views outside the conclave of eggheads, must be reminded that closing down universities for six months is a betrayal of erudition. Strike is a reality for 30 years. It is lazy to say there cannot be a new reality. Besides, it is inconceivable that a group of workers will shut down Lever Brothers, Cadbury, Shell Petroleum for one month and expect employers’ applause. Parents are not amused with ASUU’s undertaking to carry a six-month backlog of work with their new semester work. Under the market economy model we operate, it is evidence of a bloated work force that calls for downsizing by as much as 60 percent.

Sadly, even with our restless youths pleading to be allowed to return to schools, some ASUU zonal coordinators who are not yet battle-fatigued are threatening to prolong the nightmare of students and their parents. They are questioning why government jettisoned the 2009 collective bargaining (Stanley Ogoun, Port Harcourt), threatening “No retreat, no surrender” (Dr Gbolahan Bolarin, Minna), while Dr Ashiru of Lagos was expressing irritation about “Government insensitivity and disrespect for scholars.”

But I think it is time for ASUU elders to come in and ensure our children return to school. Buhari has a mindset that he is doing what is best for Nigeria without necessarily asking Nigerians. He listens only to himself and his ‘‘loyal gate keepers,” This is a leader who has no apologies for failing to deal decisively with Fulani terrorists as advised by Obasanjo, Soyinka, Ortom, Masari and El-Rufai, even now that the north has become ungovernable. He freely frittered away the goodwill of those who hailed him as a messiah in 2015. He undermined his own political party. Rather than change after seven years, he has continued to shoot himself in the foot. Scholars should understand that going to war with such a leader would amount to an exercise in futility.

But ASUU must also stop misleading Nigerians with the false claim that its opposition to payment of school fees by university students was driven by a desire to protect the children of the poor. How many children of the poor can secure admission to our federal Universities? As Prof.  Hakeem Olaniyan of the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, recently submitted “Take a census of the children we are teaching, they are not children of the poor. They can afford to pay fees.”

From experience, half of students’ intake into the University of Lagos are sourced from the diploma class where prospective undergraduates paid as much as N450,000 school fees and an additional half a million for private hostel accommodation outside the school for the one-year preparatory class. The other half comes from students who did exceedingly well, with distinctions at WAEC and must have scored over 200. The only people that fit into this category are children of the rich that attended expensive fee-paying secondary schools with school fees ranging from N500,000 to N3m.

These along with the diploma students, by ASUU’s argument, suddenly become children of the poor who would not be able to afford to pay anything above N20,000 for tuition and N16,000 for hostel. ASUU’s battle, I think, should be for provision of scholarships for children of the poor, reinstatement of the federal government loan scheme supported by state bursaries as obtained in the seventies. That is what sustained children of the poor who could not afford even the N90 tuition and hostel fees. When ASUU romanticises the past when university students ate chicken, they ignore the fact that the majority of admitted students of the period were the children of middle class, professors, lawyers, doctors and successful business men.

At Ife, I still remember some of our poor friends who are today successful lawyers in Lagos who could afford neither the N70 hostel fees nor the 20 kobo per plate food. They often slept in class pretending to be doing overnight-reading, coming early in the morning to take their bath in their friend’s hostel before stopping at the cafeteria to fill their flask with free coffee enroute to the “bukateriat’ where they could buy 5k bread.

I think ASUU should also show interest in wastefulness, mismanagement, and corruption, which today define many of our federal institutions. ASUU must also look inwards to see how to check their members who hide under academic freedom to visit horror on students.

President Buhari might have not met the expectations of Nigerians but ASUU, as part of a whole, cannot claim to be holier than the whole. Leading ASUU members contributed to the nation’s current travails. It is on record that it was a University of Lagos ASUU member that drafted Ironsi’s unitary decree 34 of 1966 that destroyed our federal system. The take-over of the most widely read newspaper in Africa south of Sarara, the Daily Times, and its sister Sunday Times, by Obasanjo, was spearheaded by University of Lagos dons.

Those responsible for an aberration, the federal government created and funded local governments, included University of Lagos dons. Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), which destroyed our budding industries, our naira, turned our country into an importer of labour from other societies was the brain wave of some dons. Landslide and sea slide victories in the opposition stronghold’s fake theory that led to the collapse of the Second Republic was by a Unilag don. The fraud called military ‘decreed political parties,’ was from the fertile imagination of a University of Benin don. Bank consolidation that consolidated wealth in the hands of a few that today pay slave wages of between N50,000 and N75,000 to university graduates employed as contract staff was postulated by a Nsukka don.

ASUU that provided intellectual support for the political, economic and military elites that have held our country hostage since 1966 cannot now play the victim.

With only nine states voting on the 44 review Bills focusing principally on mundane issues like prisons, railway, airports, legislative powers, etc. without addressing the nation’s structural defects (Onyedi Ojiabor, The Nation August 7, 2022), it is now apparent President Buhari with a pan- Nigeria mandate with his APC clear majority of 22 governors, 66 senators and about 211 House of Representatives members, is not the messiah the nation was waiting for.

For the informed, our problem is political. Pervasive poverty, corruption, insurgency, banditry, infrastructural decay in all sectors including education and health are but its symptoms. But instead of our political ruling elite listening to Kwame Nkrumah’s admonition – “seek ye first, the kingdom of politics, every other thing will follow,” all they have done since the run up to independence has been to exploit our crisis of nation building for political gain.

To betray the nation, their adopted approach was constitutional re-engineering. And their tactic began with living in denial about the heterogeneity of our nation while falsely swearing in the names of their ethnic groups on whose back they periodically rode to power.

It was ironic that the much criticised invading imperialist powers during their active involvement in constitutional re-engineering,  between 1914 and 1957,  demonstrated their commitment to Nigerians by insisting on a federal structure to protect groups and individuals from greedy political power seekers they correctly predicted would plunge the nation into a ‘turmoil of warring groups’ after their departure.

This became a self-fulfilling prophecy in 1962, barely two years into independence, when Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Alhaji Amadu Bello pulled down one of the legs of a tripod holding Nigeria together.

Unlike the giant strides recorded in areas of political development and associated social stability and economic prosperity between 1914 and 1957 when the departing imperialist powers who clearly understood it was in the enlightened self-interest of Britain that the new Nigerian state worked for all, our own political leaders, with faith neither in Nigeria nor the masses in whose name they falsely swore, wanted a Nigerian state that  was,  in the words of Awolowo, ‘held down by some while being milked by a few powerful people.’

It was Lugard’s 1914 constitution which established a Legislative Council that for the first time provided a forum for our mutually suspicious diverse ethnic nationalities to discuss as Nigerians. This was in addition to the modernisation of our feudal native administrative system. Criticism by our political elite that they were not allowed to participate in the affairs of the country led to Hugh Clifford 1922 Constitution, which introduced the elective principle and encouraged the birth of political parties – Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), the Peoples Union and the Lagos Youth Movement (LYM), later changed to Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM).

But today, looking back at how Akinsanya , Zik and their group sowed seeds of discord by resorting to lies to mislead followers that looked up to them for leadership and direction in order to destroy The Nigerian Youth Movement, it is not difficult to agree with critics who insisted those power seekers were driven by anything but altruism or nationalism.

The 1946 Richards Constitution was in response to West African Student Union (WASU) for self-government for Nigeria and other British West African countries and a federal system of government for Nigeria, sentiments echoed by our political power seekers. But they turned around to insist that a widely accepted Constitution that institutionalised regionalism was an imposition without consultation.

In response, John Macpherson, to lay a solid foundation for his 1951 constitution, allowed our aspiring power holders to consult widely, starting from the villages, and rounding it off in Ibadan in 1950.The fallout from the debate confirmed the duplicity of our political leaders.

At the Ibadan conference, the Western Region had insisted that the Yoruba people in Ilorin Province i.e. Offa, Kabba and Igbomina should be returned to Western Region and that the Igbo in Benin and Warri provinces should be returned to the Eastern Region to correct Britain’s arbitrary division of the country into provinces without consultation.

But the North that saw an opportunity of exploiting the population of the affected areas for political bargaining during census and election not only opposed any alteration to existing boundaries but with the support of the East, successfully demanded the excision of Lagos from the West, and the allocation of fifty (50) percent of the total seats in the House of Representatives to the Northern Region.

The ghost of that concession continues to haunt Nigeria. It was the joker successfully deployed by the British umpire during the 1957 London constitutional debate to whip in line, the Yoruba delegation that had staged a tactical walk-out over the status of Lagos and demand of minorities. They returned only to be told by the umpire that Ahmadu Bello and Zik (united by their conspiracy over status of Lagos and denial of self-actualisation quest of minorities) jointly representing more than half of the country’s population had formed a quorum in the absence of Awolowo and his Yoruba delegates. The two controversial issues became fait-accompli.

Northern new inheritors of power not only see every proposed constitutional amendment only from the northern prism, they have used the 1951 formula to federalise everything including the education of our children, the road we pass through , the air we breathe and even the water we drink.

The first constitution solely presided over by Nigerians after the London debacle was  the Republican Constitution passed into law on 19th September 1963, with “We the people of Nigeria; by our representatives here in Parliament assembled, do hereby declare, enact and give to ourselves the following Constitution.”

But only Zik and Balewa got their power enhanced, with the former becoming President/ Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and with the abolition of the Judicial Service Commission, power to appoint the judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts on the advice of the Prime Ministers while the latter controlled the police through the IG.

Subsequent constitutional re-engineering by Nigerians only got worse with politicians and their military fronts treating Nigerians as a conquered people. The 1979 presidential system only reflected the mindset of a junta that threw out the parliamentary system to satisfy their quest for a strong centre. Babangida and Abacha self-serving constitutional confabs were designed for self-perpetuation, Abdulsalami in 1999 foisted ‘decree 24’ in the name of a federal constitution.

Obasanjo’s N1b (N932 million) 2005 CONFAB collapsed under the weight of his third term agenda while the report of Jonathan’s N7b constitutional re-engineering was never implemented because it was a product of political subterfuge.

Buhari who failed to fulfill his promise to restructure the country to ensure justice, equity and sense of inclusiveness has admitted his failure and expressed his desire to return to Daura even as the ship of state is moving dangerously towards the precipice.

The challenge today is, therefore, before the Council of State and leaders of our ethnic nationalities, the real owners of Nigeria. If they don’t know where we are going, they will remember the spot where Nigeria’s path to greatness was derailed.