Where are we from?

Olukorede Yishau

Lola Akande, a lecturer in the English Language Department of the University of Lagos, pricks our conscience with Where are you from?, her novel from which she read excerpts at the just-concluded Lagos Book and Arts Festival (LABAF). At the heart of Dr. Akande’s book is an issue I consider one of the major problems with Nigeria: state of origin.

Reading Dr. Akande’s book reminds me of an incident in the newsroom of Tell magazine over a decade ago. A Caucasian, who joined us as an intern, and I discussed where her parents hailed from. She told me her parents were Britons. I added quickly that she was a Briton too but she insisted she was Canadian. I told her that in Nigeria, you are from where your parents are from but she would have none of it.

“I was born in Canada and I am Canadian,” she stressed.

Nigeria seems to be the only place where the area or state where you are born has absolutely nothing to do with where you are allowed to legally claim. A panelist at one of the sessions at LABAF recounted an experience while trying to obtain the National Identity card. He was born and bred in Lagos but his parents are from Edo. When he filled the registration form for the ID card, he wrote Edo as his parents’ state of origin but wrote Lagos as his state of origin. The officials of the agency responsible for the issuance of the card would have none of it. They insisted he was from where his parents were from. His attempt to educate them that the Constitution gave him the right to choose his place of birth as his origin fell on deaf ears.

The severity of the where-are-you-from challenge has seen politicians returning to their states of origin to seek elective offices only to be reminded by home-based politicians that they are ‘imported’. They are not accepted where they reside and pay taxes and seen as lepers by people in their home towns. Double jeopardy!

Instructively, at a time in the United States, two Bush brothers were governors in two different states. If it were Nigeria, they would have been confined to Texas where their father was from. It matters not that they were born in different states and had contributed to its growth through tax payment and other means.

Save states such as Lagos, Kaduna and a few others, indigenes of other states have no place in their civil service. Whether you were born and bred in those states mean nothing. You are from where your father comes from. Your mother’s state is irrelevant. Our problem is so compounded that some people will not even agree to sell landed properties to non-indigenes. The most ridiculous is when love affairs are put asunder because parents will not allow their son or daughter to marry from outside their state or tribe.

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There is also a very sad one that Dr. Akande pointed out in her novel. Even within the same state, the part of the state where you come from also matters. It is not alone for you to be from Kwara or Lagos or Ogun. In some instances, what part of these states you come from also counts.

Over the years I have also been troubled by another variant of this problem, and that is the one that involves even people within the same ethnic group, say the Yoruba, for instance. Among the Yoruba are Ijebu, Egba, Ekiti, Ondo, Oyo and so on. Some people, though Yoruba, will not allow their children to marry from the Ijebu stock. The myth is that the Ijebu are fetish and can do anything for money. So for this ridiculous reason, love has been sacrificed. There is also the myth that Egba women are quick to abandon their husbands when things are tough. As a result of these, an Egba woman is no go area for some Yoruba. I understand that in the Southeast, some parts believe that they are the ‘superior’ Igbo. Dr. Akande alluded to this in her novel. This is another angle to the where-are-you-from challenge.

What do we make of discrimination within the same town? Some towns are divided culturally into two, a situation which leads to what I once referred to as “one town, two people”. Loyalists of the two traditional rulers in such towns clash regularly and blood is shed. Yet, these are supposed to be one people. They have been made two by tradition, which someone describes as “peer pressure from dead people”. The hatred dates back to ancestors who are long dead but their evil is living after them.

Nigeria is one country which needs all. We are in trouble and everybody is needed to run and help the area they are born or where they reside. If I have lived in an area from over ten years I should be free to aspire to anything there, including the governorship of the state.

Go to our health institutions, things are in a shambles. Our education is in crutches. Our roads are death traps. There is almost no sector of our national life that we have been able to get right. We remain work in progress close to sixty years after Independence and over 100 years after amalgamation.

The tight corner that the challenge of state of origin has pushed us into has seen people committing perjury to claim a state that will help them get the best of every situation. Not a few have been known to claim Lagos today and shift to Ogun the next day. A sizeable number of students in our universities have had to pay a bribe to get documents showing that they are from a catchment area. This would not have been the case if you are allowed to claim where you reside or were born, instead of where your ancestors hailed from. In states where governments pay bursaries to indigenes, forged documents are used by students to be eligible.

Where are we all from? We are from God. And that should be what matters most. Every state or town or village begins with people coming from some other places to occupy it.

My final take: A country like Nigeria cannot continue to allow the where-are-you-from challenge to deny it of the goodness in all its citizens. We have been sold selfish interests as national interests. The good of one is hawked as the good of all and we have all gladly patronised this retrogressive market. The time to stop is now but we are certainly not ready, and years to come, we will still not be ready!