The issue of tribalism or ethnic differences have largely ruined the success of the country. It has infected our politics to the extent that people either votes along ethnic lines and where they tried to look at issues rationally and nationally, they are immediately slapped back into supposedly tribal redoubts or ostracized as traitors or saboteurs. There is widespread rigging of votes to enhance ethnic figures in the census which are usually rigged because revenue sharing is tied to census. This is a problem that affects states creation, education, financial allocation and inability to have genuine democracy and stability which has been the bane of our society. The constitution which was a negotiated federal constitution before independence has been undermined by the military dictatorship edged on by civilian politicians who have less than noble or patriotic motives.
Most of the political problems Nigeria has had since independence are traceable to tribalism or ethnicism. Example of this can be seen in the Action Group crisis of 1961 to 1963 which split the party into two rival groups which indirectly led to the incarceration in 1963 of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the then leader of opposition in the federal parliament with the combined forces of the tribally rooted Northern politicians and their collaborators from the Eastern region. Awolowo may have been ambitious, but it is doubtful and unlikely to have tried to violently overthrow the federal government of Nigeria with a few party toughies trained in Kwame Nkrumah’s Wineba Ideological School where the likes of Samuel Grace Ikoku, a former Secretary General of the Action Group was a lecturer. The evidences presented at the famous trial for reasonable felony were not overwhelming enough to condemn a major political leader without upsetting the equilibrium of the country and its stability. The reaction of the people of the West got to a crescendo in 1965 when the Chief S.L. Akintola’s government which was obviously unpopular decided to manipulate the voting process when the Deputy Premier, Chief Remi Fani-Kayode boasted that whether the people voted for their party or not “… angels would vote for them” took laws into their hands, burning and looting while the cabinet prepared for the worst. When some elements in the army struck at dawn of January 15, 1966, some of the ministers felt that their opponents were behind the “attempted coup d’état while the BBC radio network was telling the whole world that there had been an attempted coup and the prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa seemed to have been kidnapped and two regional premiers namely, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto and Chief S. L. Akintola, the Are Ona Kakanfo of Yoruba land had been killed and many senior army officers seemed to have been killed. When the news were confirmed and regional and ethnic dimensions of the killings were analysed the original cheering for the army putsch petered out in fear of what may happen because Nigeria had never seen anything like this before. Then came the counter coup of July 1966 which appeared as if the equation was balanced by the number of army officers who were killed. But unfortunately the situation got out of hands when the pogroms against the Igbo in the North began and the whole country became destabilized setting the stage for the civil war after the mediation by Ghanaian military leaders failed and General Yakubu Gowon on return from the Aburi reconciliation meeting in Ghana, appeared to have been outflanked by those who wanted to militarily sort out the issue. Going to war was a terrible denouement for which Nigeria is yet to recover. Another example that shows up the fault line in the country is forming of the federal government in 1954, 1959, 1964 when the recurring decimal of those days of the opportunity to form a more radical governments than we have ever had but people, seemed to just have their jobs rather than what was good for the entire country. We can zero on the coalition government that took the country to independence. The election in 1959 was deadlocked with the NCNC coming first with the highest number of votes followed by the AG and the NPC coming third but having the highest number of seats and reversing the choice of the electorate. If the NCNC had shown some courage by accepting the offer of coalition with the AG, the course of Nigerian history would have changed for the better but the leader of the NCNC, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe in private could not trust Chief Obafemi Awolowo. This mistrust was not on ideological grounds but on ethnic grounds. It was the latter because his party had nothing in common with the NPC, its senior partner in the coalition government. Azikiwe had erroneously argued that the AG had bought some of the elected supporters in the Western Regional House of Assembly election in 1951 where those he claimed were his party men claimed they were independent and because of this, his ethnic supporters said Yoruba people could never be trusted! This was unfortunate because politics in southern Nigeria since then have been conducted largely on assumed rigid political division between the East and the West despite the fact that the NCNC was almost as widely supported as the AG in Yorubaland.
This pattern has been repeated by dominant parties in the Western Regional election and East in subsequent elections despite the time changes and names and ideology of the parties. This has affected the conduct even of census and location of strategic industries such as location of iron and steel complexes, petroleum refineries for example had been determined by political factors rather than by economic sense. Choosing who to run these factories had not always been based on the principle of careers open to talents but rather on nebulous grounds such as federal or ethic grounds resulting in failed projects and colossal waste of public funds. The result has been lack of economic development and availability of jobs the consequences of which are slow or no growth at all thus fuelling conflicts because of competition for jobs and sharing of jobs on emotional basis of federal character and not on merit.
We can learn a thing or two from India where most jobs are determined by principle of merit in public and private sectors and this in place much bigger than us and a population eight times bigger than the Nigerian population.
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Our leaders have not been genuinely patriotic enough to fight for the common man’s good. The lessons of the ruinous civil war between 1967 and 1970 have largely been forgotten because at the root of the war was tribalism and corruption and both maladies still dominate our politics and political alignment and rather than ideology. Nobody is seriously fighting for how to make the country great and we will be confronted by the same difficult situation when the oil wells run out and there is no ability to solve the problem, and it will be too late because we woefully depend on the wasting assets of hydrocarbons which is exhaustible and it will be too late.
When the civil war ended in 1970, we had the golden opportunity to remake the country. Oil production increased phenomenally and by 1973 following the war in the Middle East and the Arab boycott, the price of Nigeria’s ‘light crude’ rose phenomenally and one of our leaders was said to have said the problem of Nigeria was not the cost of things but how to spend money. This may not be true but it shows the scandal of recklessness in those years.
We spent money in support for blacks overseas such as funding police departments in Grenada for example, embarking on iron and steel complexes and celebrating black culture and inviting people from all over the world for cultural jamboree in Lagos and building a new capital in Abuja when we could have taken Kaduna which was established in 1914 for the same purpose if Lagos was correctly considered unsuitable. A fool would soon be separated from his riches captures our situation of the time. Then the military which has become the “fall guy” for our problem of movement without motion in 1979 handed over government to civilians-led NPN after imposing an American presidential constitution on Nigeria. Meanwhile the problem of corruption virtually overwhelmed the country under President Shehu Shagari. The Shagari government was gotten rid of by a military junta under General Muhammadu Buhari who imposed a stiff and stifling government on the country. The government was at first welcomed by the people who were appalled by the corruption of the Shagari regime bogged down by importation of rice and profiteering by the leadership of the government and the parties running it.
The new Buhari government could not find a solution to the serious economic problems confronting the country. Some of its leaders were involved in selling foreign exchange allocation papers for imports in extremely controlled foreign exchange management. The sudden change of the national currency and the accompanying corruption and smuggling of the Naira from abroad by a traditional ruler whose son was a military officer right in Buhari’s office gave his enemy food for thought and proof of alleged corruption. There was a coup within the army which ushered in General Babangida’s regime in 1985 till 1993 after prolong transition politics which saw Moshood Abiola, a well-known businessman and influential Muslim politician as winner. His election brought up the recurring problem of tribalism with his Yoruba supporters ready to fight any attempt to deny him access to power on the grounds that he was a Yoruba man. Those opposed to him came from the East and the North until his jailer, Sani Abacha and Moshood Abiola died rapidly after the other in 1988. This was in mysterious circumstances in which the hands of foreign governments were suspected with circumstantial but unproven evidence. This happened without resolving the perennial North-South political dichotomy.
