Reflections on Nigerian Unity

The truth is that the so called six Majors didn’t really have any agenda for building a Better Nigeria through any means. They simply had the urge to deal and get rid of those ‘arrogant’ Northern leaders who, though seen as politically uneducated, gave their Southern ‘educated’ colleagues a good run for their money. From […]

The truth is that the so called six Majors didn’t really have any agenda for building a Better Nigeria through any means. They simply had the urge to deal and get rid of those ‘arrogant’ Northern leaders who, though seen as politically uneducated, gave their Southern ‘educated’ colleagues a good run for their money.

From the 1953 conference in Lagos, which saw the humiliation of Northern leaders simply because they believed the region was neither consulted by their Southern colleagues nor was it prepared for self government at a time when there were very few elites from the region with the required education, experience and capacity to man the various offices and positions in the region to the current happenings within the national political and economic horizons, it may safely be concluded that indeed not much has changed as far as the understanding and resolution of the various segments of the country to co habit together.

I am worried that the net effect of this glaring endemic failure has manifested in the failure of the country to attain any greatness and even meet up with minimum level of development required to propel and advance the standards of living of the Nigerian people.

Nigeria is certainly undeveloped with all the tremendous human and material resources that it is endowed with. Part of the problem is the reality that from within the nation, it has been impossible to produce the required leadership that can turn things around. Virtually all aspects of life that have already been gotten right by smaller and less endowed African nations are basically absent and lacking in Nigeria.

Electricity, power, schools and healthcare are out of reach of most citizens. Those who can afford have to travel out of the country sometimes to neighboring countries like Ghana and Benin Republic to attend to simple ailments and every day, the elite in political and economic control continue to pitch the people against one another just for the sake of perpetuation of their evil deeds.

Who cares, for instance, if an Ijaw man is the President of Nigeria? What is important is the man living up to expectation? Is he meeting up the realities of the day by properly governing the nation into self sufficiency? Nobody seems to be interested in matters like this anymore. What the people have been taught to pay attention to is where the leaders come from and no matter how bad they are, as long as they belong to our clime and faith, they are alright.

Little wonder it is therefore that some characters from the Ijaw bloc are spitting fire that their man must run for presidency the second time even in the face of this glaring failure that the first term so far is. I challenge anyone who has any record suggesting that there is an improvement or a leap forward in any major area of governance since the coming of Goodluck Jonathan to office following the death of the late Umaru Musa Yar’adua.

Can anybody show any improvement in our ways of life or even the conduct of public officers in government? So, if democracy is about choice of representatives that would improve the quality of lives of the people, what returns can the leadership or even the followership claim is there for the people?

Soon after the elections that rigged Goodluck Jonathan into office in April 2011 and the aftermath, sustained debate has raged as to whether in reality the country ought to remain the way it is or go for what some opportunists refer to as the sovereign national conference.

I have never been worried about such calls because I know those at the forefront are cheap in blackmail. In the days of the military when such calls were made, the military leaders felt threatened and used all avenues to douse the talks. In fact the call for such a conference was more of a strategy from the South West political establishment to wrestle power from their Northern colleagues especially in the aftermath of the June 1993 presidential election and the annulment of the result.

Since Obasanjo was elected in 1999, the matter died down until recently and in my view it is resuscitated as a strategy of ensuring the perpetuation of the South on the nation’s leadership.

However, the artificial nature of such a call and the seeming response of certain wings of the Northern elites seem to be in the mean time keeping the agitation in check as weak as such agitation and the responses are.

My worry is whether in reality Nigeria can make any meaningful progress under the current order of mutual distrust amongst the different peoples that comprises it. I give the military a chance anytime the issue of state creation and the weakening of the Nigerian federation are in focus. The antithesis is what we see today in attempt by different sections of the country to rejuvenate or form blocs that hither to did not exist.

The south-south grouping, the attempt by the southeast and even the funny and not yet defined middle belt economic grouping to me points to one particular direction. That the states created thought to be the resolution of national crises after all was a mere imagination of the military rulers.

Certainly, Nigeria is facing tremendous crisis of development and everything seems to be in shambles and there does not seem to be the required attention on the part of leadership to get things right. The followership is most gullible in this failure arithmetic.

It is time that the mass of the people realized that the elites from their various camps are not with them in sincerity. That what the elites want at all times is to use the people to achieve their selfish aims of accumulation of material wealth at the expense of the rest of the society.