At last, comes tomorrow, 1 January 2014: the centenary of Nigeria’s amalgamation by the British Lord Frederick Lugard!
And come 4 February 2014, a 20-month chain of activities would kick off, with “legacy projects” nationwide, led by a new Abuja city gate and a Centenary City in Abuja, modelled after the likes of Dubai, Monaco, Shenszhen, Singapore and Songdo (in South Korea), which will gulp a cumulative private sector investment of US $15 billion of which, according to Anyim Pius Anyim, secretary to the Federal Government, the Jonathan Presidency would not spend a kobo.
“We must celebrate Nigeria”, former Senate president Anyim had declared on 24 January 2013 at a press briefing in Lagos, “because if we cannot underscore the essence and advantages of our unity, it means we plan to promote disintegration.” How about that for some mechanical piece of thinking!
While a good number of Nigerians are nonplussed by the Lugardian patch-patch, even if not a few think it would have been a fantastic rainbow if it had not been so hugely dysfunctional, President Goodluck Jonathan, the latest beneficiary of the toxic Lugardian court, and his coterie of revellers, would rather celebrate!
Such is the Jonathan Presidency’s fixation with Nigeria’s centenary celebrations.
Lugard, of course, was a patriot. From Asia to Africa, from India to Nigeria, Lugard was a thoroughbred poster child of empire building — empire, that political euphemism for economic banditry. The Brits themselves picked no bones about such banditry, Pax Britannica!
The marauding, might-is-right logic that made Queen Elizabeth 1 (1533-1603) to knight Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596), the patriotic pirate, because his sea-crested loot redounded well with home country, was the mandate that powered Lugard, et al: go forth, plunder and pacify the natives in the name of home country; but sell the pacified natives the dummy of a superior religion and culture! Pax Britannica!
Lugard did his duty to his country. But in doing that, he created another headache: the Nigerian conundrum, that would be 100 years tomorrow.
This centenary, therefore, is a toast to British greed. But it is also sobering juncture for a political amalgam that seems incapable of gelling into a harmonious compound; a supposed federation that spectacularly miscarried, a beacon that became a mirage: leaving the people distraught, disoriented and near-hopeless!
The snag is: all these appear lost on the Jonathan Presidency.
Or could the centenary fixation be some expensive escapism, the Jonathan government’s fond hope of burying the unwholesome fundamentals under a din of pomp?
If so, it would be hardly surprising. The Nigerian people can gnash their teeth all they want. But for their rulers, it has been a ceaseless party, from the time of Lugard till now!
Indeed, the Lugard spirit — that grim plundering ethos of a soldier-ruffian — never left the Nigerian power court. But whereas Lugard patriotically plundered, as Drake patriotically pirated, for Mother Britain, his Nigerian relay of successors have often fended for themselves. That tradition was well established before Goodluck Jonathan, the man from Otuoke, the minority of minorities from the Niger Delta, became president.
Of all Jonathan’s predecessors, there appears no exception: not the sanctimonious Olusegun Obasanjo; not the charming but power wayward Ibrahim Babangida; not the stark and grim Sani Abacha.
That feisty, borne out of self-help, appears the logical explanation for the centenary pomp in the ruling court, when the majority of Nigerians continue to agonise over 100 years in the wilderness, and how to break out of the cul-de-sac, and build a vibrant and vigorous Nigerian federation, that can deliver development and prosperity, from the present retardation and corruption.
Still, no matter how conceptually flawed the centenary programme is perceived, there would appear some sweeteners.
For starters, the promise of 15, 000 jobs in public works, to be generated in building the new Abuja gate and the Abuja Centenary City, would be more than welcome to the large army of Nigeria’s jobless youths.
No less tantalising are the projected ICT centres in all Nigerian universities that do not have one, a modern library in a university in each of the six geo-political zones, one police crime laboratory in each of the six geo-political zones, building and renovation of sports facilities in each of the federal universities and the renovation, naming and renaming of colonial sites in the country.
Also on the cards is a dialysis centre in each of the six geo-political zones; and renovation and upgrade of the National War Museum in Umuahia, Colonial History museums in Lokoja and Aba, and the National Museum inside the Old Residency in Calabar, Cross River State.
But underpinning the projects is Nigeria’s ever-recurring nemesis: over-centralisation in a supposed federation. By the centenary plans, each state would be proud host to a Unity Square. Did the idea emanate from the states themselves or was it a central agenda, in the federal government’s mechanical fixation with “unity”?
And how much evidence is there that the states would go with “unity squares” and not some other investments in schools, hospitals and roads: other more pressing areas where the locals feel their shoes really pinch?
Besides, how much of it was driven by a contract-award mentality, itself driven by illicit money to be skimmed from the projects; and how much by the actual needs of the beneficiary communities?
But beyond rectitude and turpitude, the Centenary programmes reek of misplaced priorities. It is surprising, really, that a government that would endure closing down Nigerian universities for nearly six months, because it claims it had no money to meet the demands of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) had, long before, proclaimed the projected centennial budget a done deal, even if many of those projects, to be fair, are nothing but white elephants.
Besides, Budget 2014 estimates shows a Jonathan Presidency clearly in centennial spending mood!
First, our zoologist president would, according to newspaper reports, blow N14.5 million on two brand new animals for the Aso Villa zoo! Then our nomadic president has proposed N2.3 billion for local and international travels 2014. To make these trips as comfortable as possible, the presidency is shopping for a new jet — the 11th in the fleet — for which some N1.5 billion would be deposited in the next financial year!
Lord Lugard wired Nigeria together, not to develop the territory, but to empty it for the voracious British Empire. That is no event to celebrate, except to forge a counter-paradigm to develop Nigeria; and deliver happiness and prosperity to its people. But the Jonathan Presidency clearly thinks otherwise!
Despite the promise of a national dialogue (hailed by presidential sympathisers but slammed by the opposition as another Jonathan dissembling antic), Nigeria moves into its centenary in a din of confusion, its structural problem getting more acute, and the state itself wobbling under its patent contradictions. Again, that is hardly anything to celebrate!
Who will save the Lugard patch-patch from its modern day Nero, salivating for a big party, when there is virtual fire on the roof?
• Despite everything, a happy new year to readers of this column.
