3 UNAVOIDABLE CURES FOR NIGERIA’S FAILURE

Amotekun, Biafra (IPOB), MEND, Boko Haram of Southwest, Southeast, Southsouth, and Northeast/Northwest, respectively: though they differ in name, stated aim and operational strategy, yet they have one thing in common: dissatisfaction with the structure of the Nigerian state. Underneath them is the near-dead masses whose muffled cries is about the destroyed economy.

What Exactly Is The Trouble With Nigeria!

We all can confirm from our experiences, that the economy of Nigeria is in very bad shape, so bad it now requires the wondrous work of being raised from the dead. The fundamentals of the Nigerian economy are nothing to write abroad about. The Nigerian professional, small business owner, etc., works just as hard, and has just as much smarts, as their counterpart in, say, US. But the returns on their inputs of time, knowledge, etc., have such comparative disparity that many who have the opportunity to relocate abroad do so happily. The story is even worse, in fact unspeakable, for the majority of our citizens, who are less equipped for the normal everyday economic competition. But all hopes are not lost.

What exactly is the trouble with Nigeria?

Bad leadership! The Venerable Late Elder Chinua Achebe told us so a long time ago. And he was right. There is no doubt at all that the name of the fellow who murdered Nigeria’s economy, and made and is still making life so unbearable is bad leadership. But, beyond the question of ‘who killed our economy’, is the question of ‘how or with what was the economy killed?’ The answer, of course, is pretty straight forward: “if we don’t kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria[‘s economy],” we were (re)warned not too long ago. Corruption is the deadly weapon used to kill the economy.

The Real Disease

But, like Peter Drucker taught us, we have to always distinguish between the symptoms of a problem and the real disease. Bad leadership and corruption are the symptoms, not the real diseases affecting us. The real disease has to do with our attitude towards the ownership of our Governments. It is about our views about who really owns our public resources. And here are the ways Nigerians look at the matter:

• My Group Owns It. There are always some Nigerians who claim and act out their belief that the public resources of Nigeria belong to their group. The proof of this is in the widespread and intensive cries of marginalization across the land. No matter what they may say with their mouth, their behaviour clearly tells us that they claim exclusive ownership of our national resources.
• No One Owns It. It may surprise you to hear my view that perhaps 99% of Nigerians, regard Nigeria’s public resources as belonging to no one in particular. You only have to compare what a typical Nigerian will do if someone took away their piece of land, or even the broken bucket they kept near their fence, with what the same Nigerian does about the stealing of large sums of public money. In the former case, he fights like crazy, in the later, he adopts “sidon look”. Some will point me to newspaper columnists who denounce corruption every day. Well, do we have as many as 1 million (that is ? of 1 % of Nigerians), who resolutely decry corruption, in all shades and at all times? We don’t. We don’t even care!
• We All Own It. Is there a single Nigerian who truly believes that the public resources of Nigeria belong to every citizen of Nigeria? May be there are. But one needs to be reminded of such. Who? When most Nigerians speak of public resources as ‘national cake’, what they actually mean is that it belongs to no one in particular. If we really mean that it belongs to everyone, we will be unhappy when our kinsman steals it, as much as when a non-kinsman does. But that is not our behaviour. In fact, ‘national cake’ is a slip of our tongue. What Nigerians really mean to say is ‘natural cake’, a sort of magic hill of cake in the wild where any one can go, spade and bucket, to dig themselves some.

Three Cures

The prescription consists of three drugs; not hydroxychloroquine, zinc and zithromex, though:

1. Restructure The Polity. Not long ago, under the Lucky President, we even gathered a large population in Abuja, gave them large allowances, just to properly spell out the name of this prescription drug. It seems however, that there is no pharmacist in town to decipher what’s prescribed, yet. The goal of restructuring is to reshape the ‘national cake’ to good shape and send the bulk (with their buck) down to the states, and surely, further down to the local governments.

2. Real-Structuring. We must confront the question of how best to organize this nation of 450+ ethnic groups. We have been acting (unwisely) as if Nigeria is a nation of four ethnic groups. That has to change, if we want change. After 50 years, there is no better drug to do the job than Awolowo’s (1966) prescription in his ‘Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution’. We have to give every one of our 450+ ethnic groups a seat in our National Assembly. We have to because we need FAIRNESS as much as we need UNITY. The present system is an artificial (Not REAL) structure.

3. Unity In Diversity. The first drug alone will not do; because a national economy is not just the sum of the economies of the constituent states. Whatever is left at the centre would still be more critical to our growth than what is moved down. To grow to the best of our potential, we will still need to unite at the center. There will always be national cake. Furthermore, the second cure will avail inadequately unless we are united. The ethnic groups must persuade themselves that they are good neighbours, not enemies, living together in a neighbourhood called Nigeria. Comparatively, this is the most difficult of the three cures. While we use language as basis for Real-Structuring, we have to reach deep into our histories for everything we can get for promoting the compelling unity in apparent diversity.

Long Search for Unity

In 2012, I decided to revive and finish a private research project I started back in 2000-2001, when I was a National Youth servant with the good fortune of serving in a national research institute with a rich library. In all of a combined 15 years, I have been a patient, meticulous, researcher into the Historical Factuality of Intergroup Relations of Southern Nigeria peoples. My hunch was that if we look hard enough, we will find a lot of grounds in our histories, upon which to base a campaign of unity of our peoples. We’ve focused too much on our differences, and not at all at our commonalities.

Extraordinary Discoveries

My discoveries are as surprising as they are satisfying. They totally change the core perspectives we have held for this past 100 years about the peoples of Southern Nigeria. I discovered that there is so much that unites the Igbo, Yoruba, Edo, and their related less populous peoples, and so little (other than language) that differentiates them. I discovered for example, that their historic leaders and civilizational heroes, ‘Eri’, Umuchukwu, Odudua, Sango, Igodo, Eware, etc., all migrated from one place, not from outside Nigeria, but right here in Southern Nigeria. We are actually just a few bits of historical knowledge away from building a Fair and United Federation of Nigeria. We have not done this yet because no matter how much we pretend, our knowledge of our differences is real; hence our cry of unity is hollow. And until we unite with a Real Structure, our economy will not rise from the dead.

This is not too difficult to achieve. In fact, we have done it before. Some of our founding fathers used nothing but language similarity, with a few tales here and a few tales there, to unite hitherto warring clans, into the ethnic nations we have today. I remember a quote of Awolowo I used to share as a history-subject student. I think I got it from a Newswatch magazine profile of the Sage. It said, and very frankly so, that: “For the first time since the days of Oduduwa, the Yoruba have come under one leadership”. Similarly, many Igbos of today seem not to realize that up to the 1930s, there was practically nothing like ‘Ndigbo’ nation, but disparate clans who spoke similar (but significantly unintelligible) languages. We can replicate this for Nigeria; we only need to find some factual historical basis.

The Work Ahead

Our historians, scholars of religion, anthropologists, etc., have done and continue to do an enormous amount of work. But the work is not over yet. It is not yet eureka. It is they who will lay the foundation for our nation’s prosperity, upon which our Economists, Bankers, Engineers, Accountants, and other professionals, will thrive. This is worth repeating: until we cure our headache of inter-ethnic group relations, we will not be healthy enough to work our factories and run our offices.

Before the release of my book, I will be sharing some of what will help us to see the need to look again at what we thought we already knew, and give us the resolve to seek afresh what we thought we will never know. For 100 years, the history books have told us, for example, that Odudua, who pioneered Yoruba civilization, trekked all the way from Arabia, or Egypt, or Nubia. The same is held of ‘Eri’ of the Igbo, that he came from Israel. But, by patiently and painstakingly going through the literature from the 1910s to 2010s, I discovered that Odudua actually paddled a canoe up through the creeks of the Niger Delta, lived for some time at Igodomigodo (now Benin), and eventually relocated to what is now Ile-Ife. Same applies to the Kings of Benin, as well as Igboland’s historic icons. Much of these facts are there in the written records. We only need to recognize them. 

In fact, from my research, in which I examined the literature from about 1910 to 2019, it appears certain that we may have been totally wrong about all that we previously ‘knew’ about the historic figures of Yoruba (Odudua, Oranmiyan, Lajemisi, ‘Orunmila’, Ajaka, Sango, etc); of Igbo (‘Eri’, ‘Eze Anyanwu’, Nri Ifikuanim, Nnoha, Umu-Chukwu, etc.); and of Benin (Aka, Idu, Igodo, Ekaladerhan, Ewedo, Ogun Eware, Ewakpe, etc.). For example, the super famous Akpa-Arochukwus of Igboland, who gave us the word Chukwu, today’s Igbo word for God, has been described in our history books this past 100 years as being originally Jukun (Benue Valley), Ekoi/Ejagham (Cross River), Portuguese (European), Carthaginians (North Africa), Jews (Middle East/Palestine), Fulani (Northern Nigeria), and even more! The late great Igbo historian, Prof Afigbo, was annoyed to no end by this characterization of the Aros. However, a 1933 report of British Colonial Official WHF Newington, contains not only the fact that the Arochukwu relocated to Igboland from Ekpeyeland in Niger Delta, (pioneer Igbo historian Prof Kenneth Dike also suggested Niger Delta); Newington wrote that he was shown the very place the famous Chukwu used to be.

So, if we re-examine the facts we already have, and see that indeed Odudua of the Yorubas, Eware Ogidigan of Benin, and Aros of the Igbo, for example, were ‘brothers’ (as we like to put it), why, then, can’t the Igbo, Edo and Yoruba of today live as very good ‘brother-neighbours’ in one larger nation? So that, when for example, an indigene of one group steals a roomful from the federal government, he or she will be condemned as well by his ‘kinsmen’ as by those who are, in fact, his ‘extended kinsmen’. The more ethnic groups we factually reconnect, the easier we unite Nigeria. The building of that attitude and creation of the polity that will be conducive to it, is the wonder work that will raise our economy from the dead.

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About me:

I was a Student Leadership Activist, who became a Senior Legislative Aide to the DSP of NASS, went to work in Oil Services sector, returned to public service as a Candidate for House of Assembly seat, and have since 2012 settled down to my private research and publishing career, based out of Port Harcourt, specializing in ‘Historicals’. My New Book, “Akalaka-Ekpeye & How They Ruled Benin, Ife and Igboland” is due for release soon.