Your Excellency, we urge you to see this perspective. Trying to heal Nigeria’s diseases with a supposedly almighty Nigerian wand has never worked, and it will never work. Military regime after military regime thought that the way to solve Nigeria’s problems was to pursue a centralizing, forced-unifying and forced-integrationist path. Well, they succeeded in centralizing, but that made the problems of Nigeria enormously worse. In the place of the locally based leaderships and local loyalty and passion that had moved the regions forward fairly strongly in the 1950’s, they strapped on all parts of the country a leadership with a pseudo-national orientation, a leadership divorced from the ruled in all localities, a leadership with no empathy for, or loyalty towards, the ruled. Then, as civilian politicians, using all their political power and influence, and the huge wealth that they had acquired in political offices, they proceeded to institutionalize the new brand of leadership by creating a powerful political party, the PDP, to encapsulate it all. And the outcome is that this super-party is able to force its candidate at election time on any state or local government, rig him into position, and demand of him loyalty to the culture of the party and not service to his own people. In the process, public corruption, already mountainous and all-pervasive, grew greatly in stature and confidence – and the common people for whom the state and local governments were established could only watch helplessly as they are robbed and raped. To be able to get any share at all, most ordinary Nigerians began to worship the robbers and rapists. Things could not be worse even if Nigeria were conquered by a horde of foreign bandits.
In short, Your Excellency, the solution is not more centralization, or the fostering of more, or other, super-powerful political groupings. The solution is to restore control to the people – to empower the people to nurture again a leadership that is produced by the people and that serves the people. And there is no other way to accomplish this than by empowering each ethnic nation to call out its traditional ethical norms and laws and cultural influence for the guidance of its own affairs. There is no other conceivable way to get it done. There is some news as this is being written, that some super-powerful politicians are working on creating another super-powerful party to seize power from the PDP. Even if this new group manages to achieve the seizure of power, there can be no real change. The supermen of the defeated group will only stream to the party of the new holders of power – and the country will then return to square one. In the end, it will only be like replacing the leopard with the hyena as gate-keeper to the animal farm; neither will do anything other than steal the goats. It is because more and more Nigerians are coming to see these truths that the volume of voices is growing for either the replacement of the 1999 Constitution by another constitution that restructures our federation, or the outright dissolution of Nigeria.
Your Excellency, we are distressed that, in your statement, you would castigate the Nigerians promoting these demands as “idealists who cannot wait to see a “perfect” Nigeria,” and who “agitate for the cancellation of the 1999 Constitution on the premise that there was too much concentration of power and resources at the centre”, and as “demagogues and other anarchists who will sooner take Nigeria back to the chaos of the 18th century”, who want “to see the country balkanized into small territories to be headed by tribal leaders”, who “desire the country’s break-up into “geo-political territories, whereby big ethnic groups may swallow up small ones without a challenge”, and who are “asking for a new constitution that will allow them keep 100 per cent of money derived from the sale of oil that is extracted within their territories”.
We really must urge you, Your Excellency, to rethink these sentiments. “Chaos of the 18th century”! Is that the way a leading son of Africa like you, sir, should describe the history of your people? What was the chaos of the 18th century? The Hausa kingdoms? The Sokoto Caliphate that came later to unify most of the Hausa kingdoms? The Yoruba kingdoms and the Old Oyo Empire? The Kanem-Bornu Empire? The kingdoms of the Edo, Igala, Nupe, or Tiv? The kingdoms of the Western Igbo or the village democracies of the rest of Igboland? The states of the Ibibio or the city states of the Ijaw? Are these and other significant cultural and political creations of our history the chaos of the 18th century?
In a way, it is greatly valuable that you voiced these sentiments – valuable because you thereby highlight a very important weakness and flaw in the way many leading citizens of Nigeria view their country and handle its affairs. For such citizens, our past as peoples was generally one of barbarism, chaos and oppression; it was the white man, the British, that brought civilization, order, peace, and law to our lives. Therefore, why should we even think of examining what they created and gave to us? Why should we ever think of looking closely at the Nigeria that they gave us, and why should we ever want to strive to mould it, or the management of it, to suit our own cultural ways? We had no culture!
Your Excellency, please ponder these things, and it will strike you what terrible consequences this way of looking at our past has wrought in the corporate life of Nigeria. Do you see in the rulers and leaders of Nigeria and its various states today the same near-sacred devotion to the public good, the same dignified joy in service to their subjects, that characterized the rulers and chiefs of the Yoruba kingdoms? What researchers are finding is that Yoruba kingdoms were ruled according to certain pan-Yoruba ethical norms that limited the power of rulers, respected the dignity of the individual in society, promoted the welfare of all in society, and provided a high code of conduct for rulers, chiefs, and other prominent persons (a code of conduct that was fiercely enforced through powerful ritualized institutions). According to these researchers, this political culture had the effect of making the Yoruba person a citizen who values his freedom of choice in society, who expects to be decently respected by those holding authority in society, who expects probity and accountability in his rulers and chiefs. On the basis of these standards, can those who lead and rule the Yoruba in Nigeria today be really called Yoruba leaders? Of course, the Yoruba are being used here only as an example. Many other Nigerian nations have much to be proud of too.
The noise of anger, desperation, resistance, conflict and turmoil are audible all the time from every part of Nigeria. What those noises mean is widespread rejection of the prevailing conditions of governance and leadership among all the peoples of Nigeria. Even the common people of the Arewa North, whose leaders have ruled Nigeria much longer than leaders from other regions, have seen very little that is aimed at the improvement of their quality of life. In all regions of Nigeria, it is the political leaders that are doing well for themselves; the welfare of the masses of the people is no longer a factor in government at any level. Create constitutional arrangements and systems that empower each nation to produce and control its leadership in its own way, and the quality of leadership and governance will improve dramatically across Nigeria.
Finally, we ask you to note the conclusion enunciated by Karl Meier in his book on Nigeria entitled: This House Has Fallen. He stated that the only long-term solution in Nigeria to the crises that arise in a multi-ethnic state is for the various Nigerian nationalities, however many they may be, to “sit down and negotiate how they want to govern themselves and how they want to share their resources, and to decide whether they want to ultimately live together. Until they begin that process of internal reconciliation, at best Nigeria will lurch from crisis to crisis. At worst, it will fall apart”.
We also ask you to acknowledge that there are countless Nigerians of your calibre who believe that Nigeria, like other multi-nation countries in the world, may, or even will, (or perhaps even should), dissolve into many smaller nation states. Given that, our continuing to follow the path we have followed since independence – the path of nation-building through a highly centralized state structure and the depression of our ethnic nations – holds a high potential for a violent end. Even if the ultimate fate of Nigeria will be dissolution, let us work to make it peaceful – let us make a violent parting unnecessary.
