This was the concluding paragraph in last week’s piece in this column: “We cannot of course get rid of, or ignore the “Wazobian tripod”. But neither can or must we be restricted to it when the subject of discussion is the question of Nigeria’s unity and corporate existence. Are we caught on the horns of the dilemma of there being no choice between a broken tripod and a mere millipede whose status in the hierarchy of nature is well below the soaring skies of the bald eagle, our national symbol? Yes and no. This will be the starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series”.
Well then for starters in this concluding piece in the series, what are, respectively, the “Yes” and the “No” responses to the loaded question of the dilemma of there being no choice between a broken tripod with only two legs and a millipede whose fate is to crawl and forage for food in the undergrowth of the earth? I am of course assuming that most of the readers of this piece and of the series to which it belongs, know exactly what these metaphors stand for: the tripod as an image for the dominance of the three biggest ethnic groups on the African continent in the human and demographic composition of Nigeria; the millipede as a trope for the fact that beside the big three, the country’s demographic identity is made up, literally, of hundreds upon hundreds of ethnicities. However, given the possibility that a younger generation of readers and compatriots might not have the lived experience that would conduce to a rich and nuanced perception of what these metaphors of the tripod and the millipede stand for, a quick gloss or explanation might be useful.
Thus, we could start from the little-known fact that Nigerian federalism dates back to the early 1950s when the three big regions of the North, the East and the West came into being. Please take note, dear readers and compatriots, that even though the Nigerian nation-state came into existence when the Northern and Southern Protectorates were amalgamated in 1914, Nigerian federalism does not date back to that event; it dates from the early Fifties of the last century when limited self-rule under colonialism began to pave the way for independence and full nationhood in 1960. Please note also that long, long before the three regions came into existence to lay the foundations of Nigerian federalism, the big three “Wazobian” ethno-nationalities of Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani and Igbo had historically been in existence, albeit in profoundly different stages of economic, socio-political and cultural formations than what we know of these groups today. At any rate, what is pertinent is that for good or ill, the spatial and demographic spread of these big three groups more or less coincided with and dominated the three big regions of the West, the North and the East respectively. They did not exclusively constitute the ethnic, linguistic and cultural complement of their respective regions; but their respective dominance in each of the three regions was indisputable.
Of course, in the period of four and half decades since the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war, the three regions have been effectively broken up. In other words, it can be said that the tripod standing on three legs has gone. Enter the “millipede” with hundreds of legs, actual or potential. In other words, from those three huge regions of the Fifties and early Sixties, Nigerian federalism went, first, to four regions; then to twelve states; then to nineteen states; and finally, to the present thirty-six states, with possibly more to come. However, the memory, the resonance of the three regions and the ethno-national Wazobian tripod continues to haunt all discussions of federalism and restructuring in our country. No secessionist or devolutionary group or movement represents this residual metaphoric power of the three-legged tripod more than IPOB does.
As I have stated many times in this series, for IPOB, there are only three “nations” in Nigeria: Biafra, Oduduwa and Arewa. Since IPOB is not one jot interested in Nigerian federalism, it may be argued that what the secessionist organization thinks on the matter should not concern us. But it is also the case that beyond IPOB, most groups and individuals vigorously debating the thorny and convoluted issues surrounding Nigerian federalism today also draw on the tripod metaphor, some explicitly, others implicitly; some in support, others in rejection. For instance, the regionalists and zonal advocates of both the Southwest and the so-called “core North” (Northwest and Northeast) for the most part base themselves on versions of the Wazobian tripod.
The “rejectionists” are mostly those who never in the first place accepted either the validity or the usefulness of the tripod metaphor as an appropriate representation of where our country was and/or where it is headed in our search for a genuine, robust and equitable federalism. Their problem, their dilemma comes from the fact that if the tripod is not acceptable as a metaphor of Nigerian federalism, neither is the centipede or the millipede exactly an endearing image of a robust federalism: hundreds of tiny legs with which to stand or walk in place of three, this is not a reassuring image of national identity and robust federalism! In other words, mere numbers acting as metaphors, whether large or small, do not in themselves conduce to viable and equitable federalism. The recognition and acceptance of this limitation of metaphor – all metaphors – nudges us towards a radical critique of the (existing) politics of Nigerian federalism of which we can only provide the barest outline in this piece.
In our construction of such a critique, we could begin by asking the simple question: who or what are the federating units in and of the Nigerian nation? The same question could be posed and is indeed often posed to other federal or confederal nations of the world. Here, let us restrict ourselves to Nigeria. For the great majority of all the groups and individuals writing about and/or struggling for true and just federalism in our country today, the answer to this question is unequivocally this: the federating units or entities are the ethnic groups or nationalities that were there, that have been there long before “Nigeria” arrived on the scene of history as a multi-ethnic supra-nationality of many peoples, languages and cultures. Without in the least bit questioning the validity of this view, we must nonetheless question its adequacy. Why? Because in the modern world, in all post-tribal societies of the recent past and the contemporary present, federating units and entities include workers representing themselves as workers; businessmen and women representing their trades and enterprises; professionals representing their professions; students representing themselves as students whose interests must be protected; farmers representing themselves as the ultimate guarantors of nation’s food needs. There is indeed a philosophical or “theoretical” basis for this expanded view of the representation of federating units in all the nations in the modern world and it is this: the fundamental, irreducible units and entities that come together to “federate” in all the societies and nations of the modern world are human beings as they produce both the means of their own survival and the surplus they need to assure the survival of generations of their progeny yet unborn. Permit me to briefly expatiate on this idea, especially in the Nigerian context.
It almost seems absurd to say this, but all the same, it needs to be stated that just as, short of war, no ethnic or language group can and will be expelled from the physical space that it currently occupies in the Nigerian land mass, so is it also indisputable that all groups in contiguous physical and economic proximity will engage in trade and exchange of goods and services, within Nigeria or in any other arrangement of joint, associated nationhood. In other words, our peoples are not only “federating” as speakers of certain languages and bearers of certain ethno-national cultures, they are doing so as producers and consumers of goods and services; and they are doing so necessarily and inevitably. Who has not heard of trade and commerce across the bloody, tragic battle lines of the Nigeria-Biafra war? Which adult, literate, thinking Nigerian does not know that all our peoples, North and South, East and West, face physical, environmental and production challenges that can only be resolved in cooperation, whether within the current Nigerian nation-space or another? The regions and zones that are completely landlocked, will they not always need access to the seas and the ports of the coastal regions? The regions and zones that face great, daunting pressure of scarcity of land in relation to high population densities, will they not travel and migrate outwards, whether the land they travel within or into is the present-day Nigeria or other nation-states altogether? And the regions and zones that depend on the movement of capital, goods, services and peoples, will this imperative not be there whether the nation be what we have now or a successor nation-state brought into being after the last talks, the last plebiscites may have ended the life and times of the country we now have?
If these questions seem to indicate that I am either dispensing with or downplaying the significance of language(s), ethnicity and indigeneity as representational or “federating” vectors, let me quickly dispel that idea. Nigerians are no different from the rest of humanity: we draw our identities from the language(s) that we speak; our hometowns; the places where we were born and have made our permanent residences; myths, legends and symbols of ancestry, cultural achievement, civic pride and breakthroughs in moral and intellectual insights. These will endure and for as long as they do, we will be locked into the competing metaphoric struggle between resonances of the Wazobian tripod and the centipede or the millipede. But the time has come to considerably broaden the terms, the vectors of the representational or “federating” units and entities. We must, I argue, now add the vector of production. I could add other indices like gender and age, but for now will limit myself in the present discussion only to – production. In particular, I wish to end with a brief discussion of how an emphasis on production, side by side with ethnicity and language(s), would substantially reduce the exclusion of suffering and poverty from the central place that it ought to occupy in current debates over federalism in our country.
Very briefly then, let us begin with the well-known fact that we waste and mismanage our national wealth and resources on a monumental scale. The looting, the squandermania is colossal and probably without equal in the whole world. Absolutely without any exception, the elites of all the ethnic groups, big and small, of the “tripod” and the “millipede” formations, are involved in these monumental acts of dispossession of our peoples in every inch of the land. Where “ethnicity” is the basic and perhaps the only basis of determining the “federating” entities, in the name(s) of their ethno-nationalities, these elites primarily if not exclusively, represent themselves and their own interests. This is why, dear readers and compatriots, the poverty and the suffering of the masses of our peoples have not, so far, featured prominently in debates and struggles over restructuring and true and just federalism in our country. The inclusion of production as a vector of federalism will not automatically bring this about. But it will be a beginning move of potentially decisive impact.
A strong center with a bloated presidency that is reproduced in the executive governorships of the thirty-six states; or a loose center with a presidency with vastly reduced spheres of sovereignty, authority and influence? Compatriots, which vector of federalism and “federating” entities, is more suitable to the realization of the resolution of this question than production?
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
