In a recent article titled “Dismantling Nigeria is no easy task” Dr Ibrahim Jibrin, director of the Centre for Democracy and Development in Abuja, argued that the clamour for self-determination by the nations of Nigeria, which has reached another crescendo in recent months, is tantamount to a call for balkanisation of Nigeria.
In a recent article titled “Dismantling Nigeria is no easy task” Dr Ibrahim Jibrin, director of the Centre for Democracy and Development in Abuja, argued that the clamour for self-determination by the nations of Nigeria, which has reached another crescendo in recent months, is tantamount to a call for balkanisation of Nigeria.
Arguing the undesirability and difficulty of such change, he said that the present structure is an improvement on the tyranny of three—Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba—major tribes over minorities in the old regions. In other words, he is enjoining us not to spoil a good thing. Honestly or mischievously, Dr Jibrin is missing the point altogether.
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The best cases for restructuring Nigeria, as put forward by leaders of the many nations dissatisfied with what they see currently as an unfair and oppressive arrangement, have never been about tearing the republic to pieces. The issue is not unity, as people like Dr Jibrin want us to think; the issue is arrangement.
Whether anybody likes it or not it is clear now, perhaps more than ever, that Nigeria cannot progress further without a form of rationalisation of the current rules of association of the ethnic nations that make up the country. While there might be a minor case for the ease of such change, if not handled systematically, there is no question of Nigeria’s disintegration.
By casually appending different, albeit wrong, conclusions, to the body of oppositely directed premises of earlier works of other researchers like Dr Sola Akinrinade, from whose works he drew copiously, Dr Jibrin is in my scientific opinion guilty of academic mischief.
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Since the end of Nigeria’s civil war in 1970, save for the brief post-June 12 period when injured sensibilities made some Yoruba demand a separate country, and apart from MASSOB’s half-hearted agitation for re-enactment of secession of the old Eastern Region, nationalist demands in Nigeria have not been about dismemberment or amputation, but about corrective surgery.
It is true there were dominant tribes in the old regions but, contrary to Dr Jibrin’s assertion, the gerrymandering called state creation, started in 1963 with the carving of Mid-West from the old Western Region, merely exchanged overbearing neighbours for distant and more powerful dictators. Instead of lessening perceived tyranny, the new political strategies actually increased it in different forms.
Dividing the old Western Region into states may have redressed the over-concentration of infrastructural development around the Lagos-Ibadan axis, but unitary governance and centralisation ensured that the ethnic South-West as a whole, seen by the centre as audacious and overreaching, progressively got less and less of Federal Government patronage.
Appropriation of private property belonging to the Igbo probably assuaged traditional natives of Port-Harcourt to some extent. However, all decisions about exploitation of the oil resource emanating from their region have been ceded, firstly to Lagos and now to Kaduna and Abuja, in a way it could never have happened to cocoa, groundnut and rubber revenues of the former regions.
The subjugation of Christian and other northern minorities to the Fulani Muslim Emirate system did not decrease but projected into even newly designated territories like Abuja, despite a previously touted neutral identity that qualified it as suitable for a new federal capital.
The truth is that state creation has never been about self-determination for Nigeria’s nations. It was and continues to be a divide and rule device for the centre. Using the same minorities whose plights Jibrin highlighted, as political tools, the disenfranchisement of Nigeria’s constituent nations continued unabated, in the process inspiring an equally increasing agitation for self-rule.
The other issue—ease of effecting the proposed change—raised by Dr Jibrin, must be viewed side by side with its two prominent alternatives of retaining the status quo and a return to regionalism. History and differing national aspirations make a return to the old regions extremely unlikely if not impossible, just as the cost of retaining the present arrangement is already proving unbearable, especially with the ascendancy of terrorism.
For example, Boko Haram have said, if that is what they really want, the only acceptable option is Sharia governance in their states. There is no reason why they cannot have it, as long as it is majority aspiration in those states.
The changes need not be complicated. Each state will start to operate as a national fiscal federating unit. Economically non-viable states will have opportunity to merge with others. Common assets can be shared or managed jointly. The Interim Common Services Agency and Oodua Investment Group did that successfully for the former Northern and Western Regions respectively.
Nigeria needs not be disassembled by her constituent nations’ desire for self-governance. On the other hand, ethnic hatred and violence as we are currently experiencing, engendered by the perception that there will not be peace unless a section of the country has absolute control, and the resentment and resistance of the other nations to that notion, will inevitably dismantle Nigeria.
With the present status quo, the country is in a perpetual state of upheaval. The polity is forever on the boil. Since 1960, it has been one crisis after another, characterised by the desire and actions of some to dominate, of others to supplant, and yet of others to resist domination.
Even though most Nigerians take pride in the size, attributes and potential of our vast, varied and hugely resourceful country, things cannot continue on this knife-edge existence. This “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” cry by Dr Jibrin simply does not wash.
We have a choice. We can continue the stagnation engendered by suspicion leading to hatred and violence, or we can find a peaceful neighbourly way forward, whereby the nations are truly the masters of their own destiny.
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