Nigeria’s fatal error (3)
Moving on, one needs to clarify that there were so many nations in Africa and one should not expect the colonialists to create countries out of each one. It is naïve to ever think they would come here to think for our progress instead for themselves. Imagine the Brits, creating 350 countries out of Nigeria! And 10,000 countries in Africa! One country per village!? Of course, it is correct that the British took the amalgamation decision to coincide with the beginning of the First World War (1914), to suit itself strictly, either for the purposes of administration or for the purpose of getting Africans to put in the war-front in order to reduce the death of their own precious people (remember West African Frontier Force, I laugh). Go and ask India what the Brits did to them by making them fight needless wars all over the world, and making the Indian economy finance it!
Some people talk about the Brit taking the decision to amalgamate north and south Nigeria because the northern economy was running deficits. There are other accounts that say otherwise. We are in a dangerous impasse today, where our supposedly intelligent people believe in their own aspect of history alone. My lecturer in university called it Ptolemic Parochialism (the art of believing in your own superiority by telling history to favour you). But suffice to note that colonialists built infrastructure only for their own benefit. If there are rail tracks that get up to Kano, it is because there was something in Kano that needs to be shipped through Lagos to their continent. The rail track running through Kenya, from Mombasa, terminates in Uganda, where Lugard served before resuming in Nigeria.
When conquered, you have very few options. We were conquered. It wasn’t a level playing field, full of democracy and human rights! It is beyond belief for anyone to complain that our ancestors were not put together in a large hall to discuss whether they wanted to be together. For one, at that time very few spoke English language. Many parts of Nigeria - many nations yes - didn’t have a single person who could communicate in the colonial master’s language. Also, they didn’t have this map in their heads. And more importantly even if they could communicate and therefore discuss, they didn’t see any reason not to come together as a country, because they had always interacted, interwoven, intermarried, and most importantly, THEY WERE UNITED BY THE OPPRESSION THEY SAW FROM THE COLONIALISTS, as well as the need for them to buckle up and catch up with the new civilisation. It is we who are prejudiced in our time, due to half education. But even today, how easy is it to bring ourselves together to discuss?
This brings us to the big question. What really makes a nation? Or in other words, how can countries avoid the fates of Yugoslavia, USSR, Czechoslovakia, and now Ukraine? Note that it is not in all occasions that breaking up works for the better. Some countries are still breaking up, after breaking up. African countries have not been known to pull things like that off neatly. In my view, here are the things that make a people a nation: 1. A sense of history - not parochial history but the objective one that doesn’t tell the story to suit oneself alone. The intellectuals must have this asset. 2. Willingness to share. The constituent parts of a country must be willing to share and watch their territory develop together and in a balanced fashion. There is no way resources and natural endowments would be spread evenly across a country. This also ties in with the ability for anybody to live anywhere without discrimination, so long as he is a citizen of that country. 3. No one should look down on his fellow citizen based on tribe or pedigree. Well, ok, people who need to, should not make it obvious. As capitalistic as USA is, people who look down on others are excoriated and sometimes prosecuted. E.g. Jew or Negro haters. 4. Constant even if frenzied dialogues must keep taking place among the intellectuals of a nation, in a way that suggests that the country has come to terms with the reality that nation-building is an unending task and that every problem must and can be solved through dialogue. Intellectuals cannot afford to shirk that responsibility but they should also not discriminate against ‘peasants’ based on their intellect. 5. A sense of the future. A nation will only develop to the extent that more and more of its citizens have a sense of a common desirable future. This future needn’t and shouldn’t be defined by concrete and glass, skyscrapers and jets, but could be in terms of the quality of human beings that will emanate from that country. This is where countries focus on educating their youth. But a benchmarking of successful countries is also important on the infrastructural side. 6. A focus on service by the managers of a country, or its leaders, rulers. See the UAE. The leaders there focused on providing service, not on themselves. Today the country is great. They started on the same level as Nigeria, colonized by the same British, made up of different Arab tribes. When leaders steal monies meant for development and use it to selfaggrandise, it wouldn’t matter what some colonialist did to you 200 years ago! These among others. A federation - a case where each region stands on its own, is not a sine qua non to developing a nation such as ours, contrary to what we have been made to believe by those whose voices are the loudest. Firstly, how do you define regions, if not by accident, or by sleight of hand of one ruler or the other. Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba territory were not defined by God himself. We should stop being cocky, or arrogating a divine exceptionalism to ourselves. In this supremacy battles that we are defining, or at least the separatism that we are concretising, are we also going to stretch across borders to collect our ‘brothers’ who happen to now be part of other countries based on some cataclysmic event called colonialism or more specifically, the Berlin Conference at which our lands were shared in some smoke filled room? And as much as those colonial actions were bad, do we plunge ourselves into deeper crisis and chaos in reaction to an existing crisis and chaos?
Alas, I agree that the situation seems to be beyond redemption. We missed the bus by miles. We did everything humanly possible to undermine our nationhood. It was never like this. With the amount of hate and bad blood all over the place today, I doubt very much that this ship called Nigeria can survive for much longer. We brought it on ourselves.
Follow me, let me show you what happened: Initially we were confused - after the white man departed. Then our confusion led to rascality. Some boys killed some important leaders. Then rascality yielded to madness. Counter coups and killings. Then madness led to full-scale internecine war and genocide. We curbed the war and genocide but replaced it with mistrust and distrust. That war, still continues till today, because some swore to take revenge, economically, psychologically and otherwise. Then corruption came in, bringing recklessness with it. The two fused, and we now live in the age of reckless corruption, like never before seen in the history of history itself. Our corruption and recklessness remained, adding bitterness, lies, terrorism, religious extremism, deceit, wickedness to its ranks. That is where we stand today as a people.