Category: Thursday

As I sit down to write this column this morning, I feel like the small American boy whose story I heard recently. Let’s call him John. John and his mother are alone in the house. Mother suddenly slumps to the ground and appears to be dying. John picks up the phone and dials the emergency number, 911, and a 911 operator answers. John says, “Mom’s lying on the ground, not moving”. The 911 operator asks, “Is she breathing?” “Yes”, answers John, sobbing, “but her breathing is getting littler and littler”.

It shakes me up to say, “Nigeria’s vital signs are getting littler and littler”. But, sadly, it is true. Look in any important direction, what you’ll see most of the time is decline, decay, and rot – and each one of them getting worse and worse.

Oh, I know, I know. Some ‘super-patriots’ would hurry to point out that Nigeria’s economy was rated Africa’s largest economy only three weeks ago. That’s true. How could anybody forget that? But, what does “largest economy in Africa’” mean to us Nigerians? How has it benefited our lives? Our own federal government has been honest enough to tell us that nearly 70% of Nigerians live in “absolute poverty” – meaning that nearly 70% of us skimp, starve and suffer on just one US dollar per day! And more and more of us are falling into this condition of “absolute poverty”.

Our Minister of Power said a month ago that less than 50% of Nigerians have access to electricity. Compare that with Egypt where 99.6% of the citizens have access to electricity – or with South Africa with 75.8%, or even Ghana with 60.5%.Our situation is not only horrible, it is in fact getting worse. Some five years ago, about 50.6% of Nigerians had access to electricity. But that is not all. At any given time, even the few Nigerians who have access to electricity can only expect steady service for only a few hours per day – or even per week. And the implication is heavy. Electricity is the energy that moves the economy of our world; without it, the ability to produce goods is seriously stunted. Therefore, this one factor – lack of access to electricity –is one of the most devastating causes of our poverty in Nigeria. Every government of ours gives us glowing promises about it; but none ever does anything measurable about it. Predictably, it will continue to get worse, not better.

The same decline and decay are true of most other aspects of our lives in Nigeria. Look around you. In many towns that had pipe-borne water in the 1950s, the water no longer runs in many streets where it used to run – because the pipes have rusted away. Public school buildings are deteriorating in most of our states, and the quality of education has fallen and keeps falling. Even some of the most important of our highways (like the Lagos-Ibadan expressway) have collapsed and become death-traps.

For the most part, the root has been cut from under our economic well-being. Overwhelmed by   the almost sudden emergence of large mineral oil revenues in our economy, our rulers shifted all attention to the mineral oil and pursued policies that have virtually destroyed those factors that had begun to build our prosperity during the years before independence. By 1960, our country was the world’s largest exporter of groundnuts and palm produce, and the second largest exporter of cocoa. The income from these exports (with cocoa in the lead as foreign exchange earner), and from many other smaller export products, strongly upheld our economy and put fairly respectable incomes into the hands of our common people. By the 1980s, all these had vanished, and we were no longer serious exporters of groundnuts, palm produce and cocoa. Meanwhile, our rulers and leaders had established a powerful culture of corruption around the mineral oil revenues – becoming vicious, insensitive and self-indulgent robber-millionaires, and making it impossible for the benefits of the oil wealth to reach the lives of our common people.

These are the fundamental reasons why our people are now so desperately poor, why there is so much unemployment among our people, why nearly every Nigerian is scrambling to get some share from the stolen oil money, and why we are sharply losing creativity as a country. It is the reason why our governments and public services have deteriorated abysmally and are still deteriorating. It is the reason why our infrastructures (roads, electricity, water systems, schools, communication systems, hospitals, etc)are all steadily deteriorating. It is the reason why our leading universities, once proud centres of academic excellence, have lost their edge. It is the reason why there is such horrifying insecurity – crimes, conflicts, terrorism – in our country. Our country is one of the most unsafe places in peace-time in the world.

In the context of all these, participation in politics has ceased to have the objective of serving country and people; it has become a route to getting access to, in order to steal, the oil revenues. Legally (through allocating indefensible remunerations to themselves), and illegally (through countless practices of corruption and graft), Nigerian politicians have made themselves the best paid politicians on earth. Year after year for decades, Nigeria has been counted among the most corrupt countries in the world.

In both the federal and state governments, elected legislatures have ceased to have any meaningful role in our country. It has become their central preoccupation to rival the people in the executives in the sharing of the stolen oil revenues. In the process, the legislatures have traded away their constitutional power of oversight over the executive arm of government and over the use of public money. More or less, whenever we hear any noise from them nowadays, it is because they are quarrelling with the executive folks over their own pay or over the magnitude of the bribes they are getting from the executive folks. As for most elected Local Government councilors, all they do these days is to share their Local Government allocations.

All other agencies of order in our country have caved in and collapsed – the police, the military, the secret service, the electoral commission – all. Nigerians live today with the sickening reality that their military forces are so riddled with corruption and inefficiency that they simply no longer command the capability to defend any of our towns or villages against even hoodlums like Boko Haram.

When our president inaugurated a National Conference three months ago, very many Nigerians, including me, hoped for great changes to follow. Now we all know that we were deceiving ourselves. Worthy changes can’t happen here.

What then is left of Nigeria? Not much. Many Nigerians would say, “Nothing”. How can a country so comprehensively abused keep living?

A visitor to Nigeria remarked that Nigeria is a failed state that somehow manages to keep a semblance of standing. An eminent Nigerian remarked that if nothing changes, Nigeria would break up.  Another pleads that all that is important now is that we should do our best to break up peacefully. What then is in the future for Nigeria?

A week ago, hundreds of members of Arewa Youth Development Foundation went on a peaceful protest demonstration in Kano. They took their demonstration to a most eminent Nigerian leader–Alhaji Muhammadu Sanusi ll, Emir of Kano.  A couple of days later, they took it to  one of Nigeria’s most respected elderly statesmen, Alhaji Maitama Sule, former federal minister, former chairman of the National Antiquities Commission, former Nigerian Permanent Representative at the United Nations.

These young people are doing a good job of making Nigeria and the world hear their message. They are conducting themselves in the most respectable manner imaginable – in a manner calculated to make Nigeria and the world listen. According to all reports, they have been perfectly peaceful. They do not speak the language of violence, and they do not act in ways that can promote violence. Peaceful and self-respecting, they are nevertheless persistent in pushing their message. They do not look like ones who can be easily discouraged, or who may give up and quit. In this country in which violence is a common mode of venting group discontentment,  these youths of the Arewa Youths Development Foundation deserve to be rated as a model of sensible democratic youth action.

Finally, these youths are not children; they are not some bleary eyed school kids rioting against their teachers. No. They are responsible young adults. From even the little we can glean about them from the press reports, they are well educated people, university graduates and professionals. The president of their group is a legal practitioner. In short, these are voices that Nigeria and Nigerians must listen to with respect.

What then is their message? Principally, they demand that Nigeria should be dissolved. In their group’s prepared speech which they read during their demonstration, they urged all northerners to “rise and support agitation for peaceful dissolution of this union called Nigeria for every region to go its own way.”

And they want the dissolution to happen right now. To prepare the ground for the dissolution, they are urging all northerners resident in the South, and all southerners resident in the North, “all artisans, students, public and private sector servants, traders, business holders currently operating, residing or  intending to do so in any part of Nigeria” to return to their respective home regions within the next two weeks.

What reasons are they giving for their demand that Nigeria should be dissolved? They say that Nigeria is not working; that northerners need to terminate their relationship with Nigeria; that northerners have been suffering “continued intimidation” in the hands of the federal government; that northerners are being insultingly regarded by southerners as economic parasites in Nigeria; that northerners are generally discriminated against in Nigeria and treated like non-citizens in the South.  They say “Southerners are not welcome in the North”, and that “Southerners must go”.

What should the rest of us, Nigerians, make of all this? First and foremost, if I were a southerner living in the North or a northerner living in the South, I would start packing now.

Secondly, these youthful voices represent a very vital part of Northern Nigeria’s elite. They have the credentials to speak authoritatively for the Arewa North. Also, we need to note the kinds of responses they get when they speak directly to the older members of the Arewa elite. After listening to them, the Emir of Kano enjoined them “to imbibe the lesson of peace in their entire endeavour”. The elder statesman, Alhaji Maitama Sule, was more forthcoming. He said, “It is true that we have been suffering a lot in the northern part of the country, humiliation, discrimination and so forth – – – We believe that the best way out of this dilemma in which we have found ourselves is to have a dialogue.  – – – And that is why we have been trying to have a dialogue, we believe that we can bring to an end the ugly things that are happening in this country if all of us can come together and tell one another the truth. – – – The world can never be governed by force, never by fear and even, never by power”.

One clear picture emerges from both the complaints of the Arewa youth leaders and the responses of their elders. Northern leaders of all generations are seriously disturbed about the way that federal power is now impacting the North. This is something they have never experienced, something they cannot live with. Rather than continuing to live under these conditions in the country to which they belong, they would prefer that the country should be broken up – “for every region to go its own way”.

I am sure that most southerners would find this picture from the North very interesting indeed. All the years since 1962 (the year that the federal government launched an attack on the Western Region), the peoples of Southern Nigeria have suffered increasing “intimidation” and even subjugation by the Federal Government of Nigeria. Because the Northerners controlled the federal government until only recently, they did not see or appreciate our sufferings in those years. Because of the unjust impacts of the federal government on our lives in the South, we the youths of most of the South (Southwest, Southeast and South-south) became radicalized in various ways, most desiring that Nigeria should break up, and that we should have separate little countries of our own. The response of the North in all those years was to make the federal government more and more powerful, better and better equipped with coercive force, more and more ruthless in dealing with “dissidents”.

When, at long last, a Southerner (Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo) somehow found his way to the presidency, we thought that change would follow. But we soon found that we were deceiving ourselves – that the builders of the federal behemoth had built it so perfectly (on roots of human frailties) that it would always operate as designed, no matter what part of Nigeria the president comes from. In fact, the presidencies of Obasanjo and Jonathan are final proof that the character of the Nigerian federal establishment is unchangeable. As the system is, anybody who is president will always presume that it is part of his prerogative to handle Nigeria’s vast revenues as personal estate, to rig elections in any part of Nigeria, to discriminate against any region or people, and to bully and subdue the government of any state.

Even now that the northern elite have discovered the oppressive side of federal power, they still, strangely, out of habit, want to preserve it – while complaining against it! In the ongoing National Conference, they are still fighting might and mane to preserve the federal status quo.

Therefore, there is no other option than to do what the Arewa youth leaders demand – namely, to dissolve Nigeria, “for every region to go its own way”. Alhaji Maitama Sule wants dialogue. Hopefully, the dialogue will be to pave way for our new countries – the Republics of Delta, Biafra, Oduduwa, Arewa, Niger-Benue, and Kanem.The Arewa youths speak for most Nigerians.

Alhaji Maitama Sule is right: The world can never be governed by force or by fear.