Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State is a son to me. But as I sit here reading the Fawehinmi Memorial Speech which he delivered in Lagos some time ago, I am not just a father proud of a worthy son, I am also a grateful Nigerian – an old Nigerian grateful to a prominent young Nigerian for his very helpful perception of the daunting ills of our country.
His diagnosis departs bravely from the type that we Nigerians are used to hearing from our leaders. He dares to pin-point Nigeria’s central disease. He dares to expose the baselessly romantic picture that a lot of Nigerians habitually paint about our country. And he dares to point out the only viable path to making our country orderly, harmonious and successful.
Very many prominent Nigerians prefer to avoid telling the truth about our country. Some of these, out of fear of losing their shares in Nigeria’s oil wealth, or out of a desire to keep the power and loot which they already hold, make a habit, as the Bible says, of calling evil good and black white. You will hear them often using the word “great” for Nigeria. But they are not being truthful.
I suggest that if you want to assess whether your country is great, you should perform this exercise. Sit back, select any year in the past (make it as far back as you can remember), and visualize various things in Nigeria’s life as they were by that date and as they are today: the local primary school near your house; the state hospital nearest to you; the quality of education you could expect your child to get at school or university then and now; the chances of your graduate son or daughter getting a job then and now; if you are a citizen of the Western Region and you knew Obafemi Awolowo University campus then, how does its condition then compare with what it is today; the quality of safety and security in your street, your town, your state, your country, then and now; your access to electricity then and now; if your town had water supply then, the condition of it then and now; if your life involves travelling long distances in your country, the condition and safety of the highways then and now; the level of your confidence in your local government, state government, federal government, Police Force, the Nigerian military, your government’s Civil Service, then and now; your chances of being financially comfortable then and now; etc, etc.
The answers you are most likely to get from this exercise cannot possibly sustain the statement that our country is “great”. On the contrary, Nigeria is a country that is squeezing and crushing its citizens more and more, day by day. For any country, that is not a definition of greatness.
In his Fawehinmi Memorial Lecture, Governor Kayode Fayemi dared to say those things as they really are. And as for the inevitable consequences, he summed them up as follows:
“We have witnessed the rise and resurgence of ethnic and religious militia, communities and groups who have taken up arms against each other and the state, the privatization and erosion of the state towards narrow gains and selfish interests, the lack of subscription of diverse peoples and groups to a common mythology or purpose, the desertion of the state, and a host of other indices that reveal the essentially problematic nature of citizenship in the country”. All of these and more, he added, have tended gradually to lead towards the implosion of the British experiment that is Nigeria.
He then expertly put his finger on the fundamental roots of Nigeria’s malaise. Our country is a country of many different nations and cultures – “the British brought together ethnic nationalities that were autonomous political, cultural and economic units” and governed them without proper attention to their obvious differences. As our country was handed to us at independence, it was “foreign in its conception and organization”, and it bore the destructive cancer of the imbalances which the British had deliberately inculcated into the scheme of Amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates in 1914 and after. All these resulted in serious “fault lines and fissures”. Consequently, as soon as the British departed, the elite classes of the different nationalities embarked on “competition for political and economic advantages in the attempt to govern and control the resources of the state”.These brutal and often murky rivalries resulted in the consequence that there was gradually imposed on our federation a structure that cannot possibly produce anything but conflict and failure. Ultimately, therefore, the heart of the Nigerian problem is the “National Question”.
Let me explain the National Question. Each nationality in Nigeria, large or small, is an organism that has evolved gradually over thousands of years. Each has its own territory, life, history, and ambitions.It is laughably unrealistic for any Nigerian to think that any Nigerian nationality can be suppressed for the sake of building Nigeria, or that his own nationality can possibly “dominate” Nigeria indefinitely, or to ask that Nigerians should junk their ethnic identities for a Nigerian identity, or to think (as some Igbo folks do) that, because we are all now Nigerians, their own nation is welcome to grab any part of the patrimony of any other nation. In the modern history of the world, no two nations belonging to the same country have been as close and interwoven as the English and the Scotts who have been in Britain together for about 600 years. And now the Scotts are preparing to quit Britain and establish an independent Scotland of their own. That is the way the human world operates. How many multi-nation countries or empires of the past still exist today? No nationality that is now part of Nigeria can give up the possibility or thought of one day having a separate country of its own and determining its own destiny. Asking any of these nationalities to agree to die for the sake of Nigeria is an exercise in folly and futility. As for Nigeria as it is today, no matter how much it is loved and desired by some of us, it will come to an end – as some of the nationalities now in it take their exit. There is nothing unknown or evil in that. The immaturity that makes us rush for guns at the mention of the word “secession” will pass away.
Therefore, the key to the Nigerian problem is to find, together for now, a sensible and harmonious pattern of relationships, or structure, for our federation. At independence, we had a federal structure that was fairly right. We ought to have built on, and refined, that. Instead, some powerful ones among us proceeded to erode and brutalize it – until now we have a chaotic unitary mess. All in all, rather than roll out the drums to celebrate the centenary of the 1914 Amalgamation, we should call out Nigerians to put heads together to find the path forward to Nigeria’s stability.
“The question of the national structure is the central issue that will not go away”, Kayode Fayemi says very correctly. This young man’s perspicacity is drawing much attention to him and a huge amount of support to the party of which he is one of the intellectual leaders.
