Since the Independence Decade, the 1960s, political instability has been the common experience of our Sub-Saharan African countries. Most of the news from our region has usually been of mindless inter-ethnic rivalries, schemes of ethnic domination and resistance, rigged and violently disputed elections, successive military coups, complex mixtures of ethnic and religious turbulence, bloody inter-ethnic and religious conflicts, mass killings, pogroms, genocide, military establishments disintegrating into mutually hostile bands that seek nothing less than the extermination of one another, well-armed and riotous rebel groups and commandos on the rampage, adolescents abducted from their homes into the jungle where they are taught and drugged to kill and die, huge populations of raped and brutalized mothers and abandoned children, displaced hordes fleeing to nowhere and thousands dying and perishing on the move, civil wars that crest again and again in cataclysmic waves, the world’s largest and most barbarously dehumanizing refugee camps where deprivation, hunger and death reign supreme over the shattered lives of countless thousands.
We Black Africans constitute just about 15% of the world’s population, but our sub-continent consumes over 75% of the international peace-keeping efforts on planet earth.
What then are the fundamental causes of the instability? The root cause is that our sub-continent is home to mostly very small nationalities. Of our probably 5,000 ethnic nations, only about 20 are about five million or more in population. Of the rest, most have populations of only a few hundreds of thousands, or even just tens of thousands. No other continent is as minutely fragmented, ethnically, as Black Africa. This creates a big problem for any effort at creating sizeable modern countries. Even if we ourselves had created our countries at the beginning of the 20th century, we would have had serious difficulties doing it.
Partly fortunately, and partly unfortunately, imperial agents of the various European countries came and created our modern countries. I say fortunately, because, at least, they did the tough job of wading through our small nationalities and creating some sort of countries for us; and unfortunately, because, in their arrogance of power and their disorderly rivalries, they created very many countries that are essentially unworkable or unsustainable. Their first failing was that, in their competition and their cultural arrogance, they did not care at all about the nationalities that existed. All over our sub-continent, they created boundaries that split up many nationalities. For instance, the large Yoruba nation, with a homeland spreading from today’s Kogi State all the way westwards into modern Togo, was split roughly into three. The Hausa and Fulani with a large homeland spreading from what is now Northern Nigeria into much of the Republic of Niger were also split up. The Somali nation was split into four – with parts in Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya. The cumulative result is that many boundaries in Sub-Saharan Africa today are simply meaningless, and many are causes of serious trouble and conflicts.
Secondly, in their internal organization and management of each country, they also did a whole lot of wrongs – all of which, together, now plague our countries with inter-ethnic and other conflicts. In most countries, they ignored the obvious boundaries, and created provinces, regions, and districts, whose boundaries are seriously problematic. In many countries, they pursued policies of divide-and-rule. In some countries, they even deliberately instigated and encouraged a tradition of hostility between nationalities. In the years following the end of the Second World War in 1945, as the European countries found that they would have to give up their African empires, they proceeded in many countries to engineer constitutional and political arrangements that were designed to protect their own interests after independence while creating serious problems for the countries they were giving independence. Such deliberate engineering of future instability and conflicts were common, but the most prominent example is Nigeria, Black Africa’s most populous country.
The British were determined to leave one of the nationalities of Nigeria in control of Nigeria – a nationality that they believed would be best disposed to protect British interests after independence. They believed that the best candidate was the Hausa-Fulani of Northern Nigeria. So, they created constitutional arrangements that more or less made the Hausa-Fulani the new imperial rulers of Nigeria. They created a Nigerian federation of three regions, with the Northern Region commanding more population in the federation (according to the official censuses) than the other two regions – eastern and western regions – together. This translated to the fact that, at independence, the Northern Region had 174 members in the House of Representatives, and the Eastern and Western Regions, plus the Lagos Federal Territory, had a total 138. That put the Northern Region in control. All efforts made by various Nigerian individuals and groups to change this dangerous constitutional arrangement were rejected by the British.
The worst outcome of this situation is that, as Nigeria entered into independence, the rulers of the Northern Region were in a position to feel that Nigeria was an empire bequeathed to them by the British. Many prominent Hausa-Fulani citizens still feel that way today. All the distortion of the Nigeria federation since independence, the relentless accumulation of power and resources in the hands of the Federal Government, the impotence of the states of the federation, a lot of our conflicts and even civil war, much of the cause of terrible poverty in our country, and the growing probability now that our country may break up – all are products of the dangerously structured federation that we started with at independence. The present condition of things cannot continue.
We have only two peaceful options. Option One is to restructure the Nigerian federation in a sane and sensible manner, so that our country may become a land of stability, progress and prosperity. The natural units of Nigeria are our nationalities. A rational federal structure in our type of country must be based on our nationalities. What that means is that, in structuring our federation, we will pay due respect to our nationalities large or small. No nationality shall be split up between states. In detail, the large nationalities (Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo) shall each form a state. Then the geographically contiguous of the small nationalities will agree among them to form states. Then, we will readjust the allocation of powers and responsibilities in our federation in such a way that the Federal Government will be divested of some of the bloated powers which it now enjoys, and the state governments will become stronger and better able to advance progress and prosperity in their states. A return to the constitutional arrangements that we had at independence will do.
Option Two is unpalatable; it is that if we are absolutely unwilling to adopt Option One, we should dissolve Nigeria in an orderly manner – so as to enable each of our nationalities to make better arrangements for their future in the world. In any case, if we do not adopt either Option One or Two soon, Option Three is very likely to force itself upon us – namely, some sort of violent break-up. We can save our country from coming to Option Two or Three if we choose to. But will we choose to?
