The large nation of England and the small nation of Scotland agreed, by an Act of Union in 1707, to form a union. From the very first day, however, there were always some Scots who did not want union with England – who wanted the Scottish nation to preserve its separate identity. Such people were the founding fathers of modern Scottish nationalism.
Not long after 1711 (roughly from the 1780s), the nationalism of ethnic nations gradually grew into a force in Europe. It started with the French. Emerging from their French Revolution, the French became a strongly unified nation, went forth to try and conquer all of Europe, demonstrated how strong and proud a unified nation could be, and made every other European ethnic nation jealous. In response, the Italians, who had been living in separate small kingdoms, forcibly unified their country together as one country of Italy in 1861. Ten years later, the Germans followed suit and became one Germany. Then the many small nations that were parts of some large countries began to demand their own separateness too. Such demands resulted in the breaking up of such multi-nation countries as Austria-Hungary and the Turkish Empire into smaller countries.
But the most powerful countries of Europe did not yet fully understand ethnic nationalism, especially the nationalism of small or weak nations. Therefore, when they broke up Austria-Hungary and the Turkish Empire, they grouped some small nations to form what they thought would be viable countries – such as Yugoslavia (consisting of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Bosnians, etc), Czechoslovakia (consisting of Czechs and Slovaks), etc. They also established boundaries that split up some nations – such as the Kurds (today 30 million in population) who were split between Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. And when European countries came to Africa and Asia to create empires for themselves at the same time, they did what they had done in parts of Europe – they forcibly grouped some nations to form new countries, and they created boundaries that split up many nations.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the world has learnt more and more one hard lesson – namely, that these multi-nation countries, and these boundaries that split up nations, are simply unrealistic and, therefore, unsustainable. Nations, no matter how small, are incredibly tough entities, each being a product of many thousands of years of evolution. Nations don’t usually die. Countries that are made up of different nations usually break up sooner or later along ethnic national lines. All the powerful multi-nation empires of the past broke up in that way. All the multi-nation countries of today are in trouble; almost all are unstable; many have broken up; more and more are moving towards breaking up. And the United Nations has ruled that each ethnic nation has the right to choose to be a separate country.
If a multi-nation country is well-governed, prosperous, powerful and proud (like Britain is), it is not so easy for the nations in it to break away. That is what we saw last week in the Scottish independence referendum. Enough Scots see so much to love in Britain that they don’t want to separate from Britain, but the nationalists are proclaiming that the struggle continues. In contrast, if a multi-nation country is (like Nigeria) poorly governed, corruption-ridden, makes its citizens poor, and makes its citizens ashamed in the world, its chances of quickly breaking up are very high. The Soviet Union was phenomenally powerful, but its central government was, in its relations with its small nations, far too domineering and repressive – and the country broke up, with each nationality becoming a separate sovereign country.
Realistically, therefore, Nigeria is not likely to live for much longer. Nigeria is too strongly set in its path of crookedness, corruption, unfairness, hopeless poverty for more and more citizens, mutual hatred among nations, conflicts, and stiff-necked resistance to change. Nigeria has become a monstrous agency of destruction of all morality, and even all human virtue. And the result is that more and more Nigerians are retreating from love for Nigeria to love for their own small nations in Nigeria. For Nigeria, the basis for being one country does not exist anymore.
A couple of years ago, our Wole Soyinka said that if changes didn’t come soon, he could see Nigeria breaking up. We can say today that things are not only not changing, but that things are getting worse and worse. The growing indication now, therefore, is that Nigeria may be entering into an era of separate nationalisms. Igbo nationalism, Yoruba nationalism, Hausa-Fulani nationalism, Kanuri nationalism, Edo nationalism, Nupe nationalism, Ijaw nationalism, Birom nationalism, and so on – these now seem likely to dominate Nigeria’s near future. And the reason is that more and more of the people of each of Nigeria’s nations feel that their nation is being gradually destroyed in Nigeria, by Nigeria.
When I wrote in the Gbogun Gboro column some months ago that many of the enterprising Igbo people were fleeing from their “battered Igbo homeland”, one Igbo reader took offence at that phrase. He or she thought I was denigrating or deriding the Igbo people. But I wasn’t doing any such thing. What I was doing was saying what we all know to be true – namely, that Nigeria has seriously battered the Igbo nation. As the Igbo were rising up by the 1950s, the prospects were great that their kind of dynamism could quickly produce a technologically and industrially notable nation in Nigeria and Africa. But the drastic disorientation occasioned by Nigeria has brutalized that prospect. And more or less the same has happened to every other Nigerian nation.
Concerning my own Yoruba nation, I can say we were broadly and confidently prospering by the 1950s, and that we are poorer today than ever before in our known history, thanks to Nigeria. When I see countless thousands of highly educated Yoruba youths roaming the streets for years without jobs and without hope, when I see large crowds of highly educated Yoruba men and women lining up at foreign embassies every day seeking visas to escape from the Nigerian hell, when I see videos or read about highly educated Yoruba and other Nigerian youths trying to walk across the Sahara Desert in order to reach Europe though North Africa (with many of them dying in the desert), I, who in the 1970s had excitedly given up my successful career to go and help build a great Nigeria, am today filled with overwhelming sorrow and worry about my Yoruba nation.
I know, of course, that there are some of the Yoruba elite who are benefiting, or who hope to benefit, from the Nigerian corruption outfit, and who therefore want Nigeria to continue. But I am relieved that, in all directions, large numbers of Yoruba people are recognizing and accepting that our nation needs to free itself from the grip of destruction and establish an independent existence of its own. I look forward to seeing a Yoruba nationalist movement (like the Scottish nationalist movement) emerge among these masses of patriots, and I desire to march with them in their peaceful but focused and resolute independence demonstrations. That, I am sure, is the path ahead.
