I started my message of last week with the frustrating statement: “Being a citizen of Nigeria can often be a weird experience”. Today, I expand that statement. For any people or nation large or small, being a part of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is more than a weird experience. It can often be a debilitating experience. It ought not to be so; but it is so. Nigeria makes everything weaker and poorer. As someone put it some time ago, Nigeria is the only place where gold rusts.
One can see it in every direction one cares to turn. I turn around and look at the late 1950s, the years when I was a young adult and a university undergraduate. And then I compare with the Nigeria of today. The contrast is so staggering that it can give a person a heart attack. Today, one hardly sees the spirit of enterprise and pride in Nigeria anywhere. What one sees most of the time is the spirit of hustling – a kind of soul-destroying hankering after some share in the petroleum money. You can see it on most faces.
In the 1950s, life was joy and pride to live. Aside from the usual noise of politics and the politicians, society was bouncing in all directions. In all parts of our country, our farmers were blazing the trail to our country’s prosperity. Yoruba farmers led the pack. Countless thousands of them retreated into the deeper forests of the Yoruba farmlands and hacked out small cocoa plantations. Soon, they became the most productive African farmers on the African continent. Their cocoa exports became the largest source of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings, and the main provider of funds for the ambitious development programmes of the Western Region – Nigeria’s pace-setter region of that era. Farmers in the Eastern Region, led by Igbo farmers, poured out large quantities of palm oil and palm kernels to add to our country’s exports. Farmers in the large expanse of our Northern Region, led by the Hausa farmers, became the largest producers of groundnuts for the world market. Pictures of the groundnut pyramids in the city of Kano stood on our school walls all over Nigeria, and added enormously to our pride – the children of the great world power that was on the rise in Africa. In the schools in those days, our children had a litany that they memorized and proudly recited: Nigeria is the largest producer of this product in the world. Nigeria is the largest producer of that product in the world. Nigeria is the largest producer…
The three regions of our federation were engaged in a spirited rivalry in those years. Each region was led by a group of patriots, some of whom served in elective positions, and the others in civil service positions. None of them thought that public office was the route to personal wealth; and all of them were eager to make great names for themselves and establish great heritages.
Naturally, I knew my own Western Region the most. From all accounts, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his team were giving us in the Western Region the most far-sighted, most sagacious, and most productive government, not only in Nigeria but in all of Africa. In our region’s Civil Service, a man named Chief Simeon Adebo, head of the Civil Service, was giving us one of the most professional, and one of the most dependable, governmental bureaucracies in the world. In nearly all areas of development, our Western Region was flying on eagle’s wings. We young people proudly called our Region “First in Africa”. But keeping in the front was by no means easy. The Eastern Region was chasing our Western Region very hard and very creditably. And though the Northern Region was starting with a handicap – low levels of education – it too was running unbelievably fast. For 500 years, the Blackman had suffered a poor image in the world. Here now came, at last, a Blackman’s county, Nigeria, to wash away that image.
But today, all of that has crashed and vanished. On the faces of Nigerians, one doesn’t see the same confidence, the same push, the same resolve, the same air of the conqueror that one used to see. Most Nigerians are now slinking around to find some way to steal or to defraud, or some clever way to dissemble their act of begging, or actually begging shamelessly. Nigeria is back where the Blackman has been for five-hundred years among the races of the world – at the bottom.
Why? What went wrong? We love power. We love riches. We love to acquire power and wealth, but we do not have any noble purposes for either. We would twist and distort political and societal order in order to grab power and wealth. But we have no noble purposes that we want to use the power and the wealth for. In our hands, power and wealth tend to become agencies of destruction.
Look thoughtfully at the history of our country from 1952 to 1962, and then from 1962 to date, and you will see what I mean. Our British colonial overlords gave us some limited self –government in 1952, with continued supervision by British officials. As I said earlier on, our leaders (our Awolowos, Ahmadu Bellos and Azikiwes) made it work wonderfully. Their success was proof that this is something we can make a success of. Our sensible next step should have been to spread power out some more by giving the minorities in each a region a region of their own. But, even without our doing that, we were achieving considerable success.
However, there was a safeguard – the continued presence of the British, which made sure that nobody could seek to grab more power than was provided for in the system. But, as soon as the British left in late 1960, the persons in control of the Federal Government wanted more powers. They now saw the regional governments as obstructions to the exercise of full federal power. And since then, the Federal Government has relentlessly grabbed power and rendered all sections of Nigeria subdued and impotent. Even our present president, President Goodluck Jonathan, himself from one of the most defiant peripheries of Nigeria, is enjoying reigning in the midst of the federal control of all power and the federally-generated chaos, corruption and poverty.
In the 1950s, we lived to see our many peoples dipping deep into the resources of their culture to give our country prosperity and pride. By crushing and subduing our peoples, we have killed the spirit and the possibility of prosperity in our country.
We can, if we try sincerely and hard, return to the possibilities that we had in the 1950s. But we are never likely to do that. The ones who want power at all costs are too good at manipulating the rest of us, and the rest of us are too lacking in perception to free ourselves from being manipulated. For instance, just look at our two large nations – the Yoruba and the Igbo. In all conceivable aspects of development and modernization, these two nations want, fundamentally, the same things in this world. Yet, the two are ever working against each other in the affairs of Nigeria – rather than working together and giving most of the rest of us the leadership we need to reorganize our country and return to orderliness and progress. Dr. Pius Ezeife recently said one of the truest and saddest things ever said in Nigerian politics. He said,“As a civil servant in Lagos, I observed the Nigerian politics and found Igbo and Yoruba going parallel lines in Nigeria politics. And as parallel lines, they will remain parallel slaves in Nigeria politics”. Many of us, different nations that desire a rational and workable federation for Nigeria, prefer to operate as parallel lines – and as parallel lines, we shall remain parallel paupers, beggars and slaves in a chaotic and poverty-ridden Nigeria.
The answer is self-evident. We have to work together – work together not to get power for anybody or any group, but to put our country back on the path of order, sanity and prosperity in the world. We can do this. And if we are absolutely disinclined to do it, then, in the name of humanity, let us do the other self-respecting thing – namely, agree to part ways peacefully.
