.By ABIA ONYIKE
Nigeria recently celebrated her 63 years as an independent state, having gained independence in 1960 from Great Britain. Nigeria is actually a Berlin State, created as a result of the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. The European powers, in their scramble for Africa, arbitrarily partitioned the continent amongst themselves. Afterwards, a process of forceful amalgamation of Ethnic Nationalities took place in 1914, bringing together the Northern Protectorate, the Southern Protectorate and the Lagos colony to form Nigeria. Then she went through another 86 years of direct colonial rule by the British Crown before independence was granted in 1960. The problems of the Nigerian state today are the same type of crises faced by Berlin states, generally, namely: lack of autonomy for the Federating units and the Ethnic Nationalities. But the Nigerian case is a bit more unique.
The resources of the country, mainly the oil and gas resources are located in Southern Igboland and the Niger Delta territories. But the Lugardian state was organized in such a way that those from whose territories the resources are produced are impoverished while the resources are used for the development of the other regions and other interests based outside those territories. Britain created the Anglo-Hausa-Fulani ruling alliance first from the period of indirect rule to date. The stumbling block to national development is as a result of this nebulous state formation which is quite difficult to explain. It suited the Anglo-Saxon powers who commissioned Frederick Lugard, a mercenary soldier of fortune to put up such a terrible state formation. It also fitted the economic interests of Britain and the nationalists who fought for Nigeria’s independence never questioned the nature and character of the Lugardian state. Why did the nationalists not reject the arrangements introduced by Lugard.
They did their best in the various constitutional conferences, but according to Basil Davidson, the “nationalists may have become impatient for the fruits of power” and were probably anxious to avoid delays in the march to independence. It was part of the Blackman’s burden to assume that acceptance of the colonial state structures and its terrible internal logic was the only available escape from colonial occupation and domination. Sixty three years of self rule has not led to genuine national development in Nigeria. The economy is still backward and dependent. Our resources are largely siphoned to service foreign interests From 2015 till date when the Hausa-Fulani-Yoruba ruling alliance consolidated its hold on power, things have grown from bad to worse. The domestic currency has declined tremendously with an exchange rate of more than #1000 Naira to one Dollar.
The economy has gone turpsy turvy with the removal of oil subsidy, while national security has become unpredictable. The educational and health institutions are still nothing to write home about, hence our rulers still prefer travelling overseas for their health checks just as they send their wards abroad for quality education. Is that not a shame for leaders of a sovereign nation to indulge in such practices? In spite of these socio-pilitical maladies, the Nigerian leaders continue to wallow in corruption and self-agrandisement.
The severe problems of Nigerian federalism appears completely abandoned. The demand for the reconstitution of the Nigerian state either through a Sovereign National Conference or a Constitutional Conference has been jettisoned. Even in the face of violent insurgencies threatening to overrun national security architecture, nothing serious is coming from the political class except the old warn-out semantics which Nigerians are tired of. Islamic terrorists in the North are fighting to impose an islamic state while the agitation for self-determination is still raging in parts of Southern Nigeria. Instead of creating platforms for serious political or constitutional reforms, the rulers behave as if nothing is happening. Sometimes, those in power assume that nothing will happen, in so far as they are looting the public resources to their taste. The Nigerian leaders are also fond of asserting that Nigeria is indissoluble. Nothing mega( Igbo: Nothing will happen).
 But they forget that Nigeria is only 63 and yet wobbling as it is. The federation is functionally chaotic and crisis-ridden. The Roman Empire which is regarded as the greatest in history and antiquity, existed for 2,200 years and still ceased to exist. It was founded in 753 B.C. as a city state before it expanded into a big empire with its territories covering several parts of the world. In 1453 A.D, the Arabs conquered its Eastern capital at Constantinople( present-day Istanbul, capital of Turkey). Even the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan parts South-East Europe also collapsed and later resuscitated as the Federation of Yugoslavia which was ruled by Marshall Josip Bros Tito. The federation lasted for 62 years and collapsed shortly after Tito’s death.
Even the Soviet Union which sprouted from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 disintegrated into sixteen independent states in 1991 after 72 years of existence. The Czechoslovakia splitted into two republics, namely: Czech Republic and Slovakia. What of the state of Carthage, located on the Eastern side of the Tunisian Lake, in present-day Tunisia? It was one of the most powerful trading hubs in the ancient Meditaranean. It was eventually destroyed by the Romans during the third Punic war in 146 B.C. It was liquidated with its population with its rubble buried under the Mediterranean sea.
In the case of Nigeria, Prof. Ben Nwabueze, has warned against the arrogant disposition of boastful Nigerian leaders who believe that Nigeria is indivisible or indissoluble. Nwabueze argues that a state which originated from such “monstrous circumstances of arbitrary partitioning” from the Berlin conference and the 1914 amalgamation cannot be indissoluble. For instance, we are into 24 years of civilian democracy in the 4th Republic, yet the political class has done nothing to get rid of the 1999 Constitution which was imposed by the military establishment. That constitution is not a people’s constitution. The point has been made that the Constitution was written by an obscure right-wing legal scholar, Prof. Auwalu Yadudu, who was a legal consultant to the military-bureaucrstic oligarchy which ruled Nigeria from 1970 to 1999, with the exception of the four year period of right wing civilian dictatorship headed by a member of the pro-military Hausa- Fulani ruling class, Shehu Shagari.
The legitimacy of the 1999 Constitution has always been a source of contentious arguments and controversies because of the way it came into being. We recall that in 2007 and 2009, there were lawsuits in the Lagos and Abuja Divisions of the Federal High Court “on the grounds of fraud and forgery, seeking for the termination of its operations and the immediate initiation of a transitioning that would distill the successor constitutional arrangements”, just as Apartheid was subjected to. The suits were instituted by the arrowheads of the the Pro-National Conference Organizations( PRONACO), including Chief Anthony Enahoro, Prof. Wole Soyinka and Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu,, amongst others.
The Secretary-General of the Lower-Niger Congress, Tony Nnadi made it clear that a federation is a union of constitutions. When Nigeria became a federation in 1960, following the 1959 Lancaster House Constitutional Conference in London, the three regions of the North, East and West had their seperate constitutions. The three regions met and agreed to federate as Autonomous Regions. Each Region controlled its resources. That was the same arrangement under the 1963 Constitution after the Mid-West region was created by an act of Parliament.Only 15% of the resources of each Region was paid to the Central Government for the running of common services.
Under the current civilian dispensation, it was only during the governments of former Presidents, Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan that feeble efforts were made at organizing Constitutional Conferences. But the 2005 Political Reform Confence and the 2014 Constitutional Confab did very little to effect fundamental constitutional transformation. The government of Muhammadu Buhari(2015-2023) was committed to consolidating Fulani hegemony and went to the extreme to try to enforce lawless and violent religious sectarianism, using Fulani Herdrsmen, as the unofficial instrument for the extermination of other ethnic Nationalities. The new Government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has not shown that it can act differently. It is manifesting early signs of Yoruba triumphalism in pursuit of ethnic arrogance through the takeover of the commanding heights of the national economic and military Institutions.
For Nigeria to develop in a genuine sense, our leaders must sit up and take urgent steps to restructure or reconstitute Nigeria to make it a functional federation made up of Autonomous Regions. When we fail to achieve this, we have no justification chasing those fighting for their self-determination.
THE NATIONALITY QUESTION AND IGBO NATIONALISM TODAY.
On the 28th and 29th of September, Ohanaeze, the pan-Igbo socio-cultural Organization, celebrated the Igbo day events in Owerri and Enugu, respectively. The Igbo day celebration is usually set aside to reflect on the Igbo experience in the Nigerian federation. On the 29th of September, 1966, about 30, 000 Igbos were massacred in Kano as a fallout of the second coup of 29th July, 1966. Recall that before the Kano pogrom several anti-Igbo riots in Northern Nigeria had claimed many Igbo lives, viz: the 1937 riots in Katsina, the 1945 Jos riots and the 1953 Kano riots. So, this time around, Igbo leaders took time to brainstorm on the current security situation in the South East. The terrible security crises in Igboland is an artificial problem imposed on the region by external enemies of Ndigbo. It came in the wake of Buhari’s sectarian arbitrariness and impunity which benchmarked his conquest agenda. Being one of the extremist remnants of the genocidal commanders who executed the Igbo genocide (1967-70), during which 3.5 million Igbos were massacred, he and his fellow travellers have been bitter about the survival of Ndigbo after the brutal Nigeria-Biafran war.
Remember that the Igbo genocide was the foundational genocide of post-colonial Africa, which according to Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe was used by the European powers to inaugurate Afriça’s age of pestilence. The Igbo genocide which was an experiment in human brutality preceded Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Congo and other killing fields in the African continent orchestrated by the western powers and their local hirelings who masquerade as leaders. And that was why Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister during the Nigeria-Biafra war said he would “accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it would take Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance”.
Such proclamations by Wilson emboldened the Nigerian Commanders to approach their genocidal assignments with greater zeal. For example, that was how a 32 year old Brigadier and Commander of the Third Marine Commando, Benjamin Adekunle, alias Black Scorpion became vicious, notorious and ruthless in his cold-blooded murder of thousands of Biafran civilians just as Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s theory of justifiable starvation as an instrument and strategy of warfare contributed immensely to the Biafran liquidation project.
Under the Buhari presidency, the idea of islamic terrorism was re- invented by the fundamentalists as the final solution to consolidate their hegemonic domination in the Nigerian federation. The Igbo, being the largest Christian block has always been the target of annihilation. The policy of 97%/5% mouthed by them at the commencement of thei regime was intended to permanently silence Ndigbo. But some Igbo leaders played into the hands of the enemy. The leadership of Ohanaeze then and the South East Governors Forum colluded with Igbo antagonists in 2017 to proscribe the IPOB which at that time was still a very peaceful organization. That was after the security agencies invaded Nnamdi Kanu’s home in Umuahia during the Operation Python dance. It was the proscription that demonized the IPOB and got Nnamdi Kanu on the path of radical rethorics. However, the point has to be made that a peaceful approach to the Igbo self-determination struggle must remain sacrosanct. The Igbo should not give their detractors another opportunity to use them as canon fodder for the resolution of the monstrous crises bedeviling the Nigerian federation.
Up till today, the foreign powers still do not know what to do with Nigeria. And Nigeria is the only Federation colonized by the British that is yet to disintegrate. All the others, namely: the West Indies, the East Indies, East Africa and Rhodesia/Nyasaland etc have all collapsed with the exception of Nigeria. After the second world war, the British Raj collapsed. The hold of the British Crown in the East Indian territory came to an end in 1947 when Britain gave up its 200 year-old indirect rule in India. India was splitted into two dominions: India(opulated by Hindus) and Pakistan( populated by Muslims). Then in 191, Bangladesh seperated from Pakistan and became an independent state. All efforts made to subdue and subjugate the Igbo in the Nigerian federation have bounced back to the perpetrators of such machinations, leading to a major national crises which makes the future of Nigeria unpredictable.
The quest for self-determination in Igboland is a natural aspiration. There is no mega Ethnic Nationality that can tolerate the status of second class citizens in a country they are part of. It is only a question of time. If they reject the idea of Regional Autonomy, then that is a sure way to legitimize the quest for Autonomous Republics. Self determination is expressly guaranan and People’s Rights, to which Nigeria is a signatory. The days of empire states are over. The world is settling for organic states: nation states with a common language, common culture and religion with minor varieties. Let us hope that the rest of Nigeria would see reason and make necessary amends. It’s either we chose to cohabit peacefully on the basis of justice and equity or we go our seperate ways in a peaceful manner and still meet at the African Union. That is a better option than experimenting with avoidable bloodshed in the killing fields of African pestilence.
