National Conference:
Need to make Nigeria a political reality

By Fredrick Faseun
Being excerpts of a birthday lecture in honour of Dr. Oluyomi Finnih on February 6, 2002 in Lagos.

IS Nigeria a Nation? To answer this question calls for an understanding of our historical colonial past, the present political mood of the people and what they see as future challenges, in a world characterised by subjugating globalisation on one hand and national individual on the other.

Social scientists, we can summarise, view a nation as a group of people with common ancestry, same language, identical culture, sharing a common political experience, occupying a well-defined geographical space.

It is a fact of history that all Nigerians were not exposed to the same colonial conditions; did not share common colonial experience. Whereas the British colonial power ruled Southern Nigeria directly, in the North it operated a system of indirect rule. This meant that the administration of the area was left largely in the hands of emirs, district heads, village heads and so on. The North demanded and received guarantee from the British Colonial Government that no attempt shall be made to 'westernise' the North. "Westernisation' is nothing other than education, which they reasoned would be detrimental to themselves because it would compete with, if not totally oust, the Islamic culture they had espoused and prefer.

At independence in 1960, Nigeria had not been integrated into one nation but remained an affair of North and South as created by the British in 1914, through the amalgamation of the North and the South. Nigeria, therefore, started as a corporate amalgam, which for over forty years has not truly come to terms with itself as a political reality of a peculiar nature, moving from one crisis to another especially in the last forty odd years of its attempt to be what it is not and cannot be: a nation.

Nigeria cannot become a nation because of its peculiar nature as an amalgam. An amalgam is mixture of incompatibles. Any amalgam is inherently intrinsically self-contradictory, as it is full of myriad contradictions. The peculiarity of the contradictions embedded in an amalgam is that they obey simple Aristotelian logic. Therefore, they do not and cannot serve the interest of a higher order. They are not subject to dialectical logic. No synthesis is attainable as the result of the workings of these contradictions. They operate at parallel, different planes from each other and therefore, do not, and cannot meet.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in the amalgam, which Nigeria is; major interests work in different direction on various planes. Each interest for itself, and God for all of the rest! And the god artificially brought forth, and mechanically located at the centre, finds co-ordination extremely difficult and impracticable. In the circumstance, the essential energy of the collective life force transpires in the environment as the conflictual nature of the amalgam necessarily can only dissipate energy instead of harnessing the same towards the attainment of loftier goals.

All the military facilities of the new amalgam, including training schools for both officers and men, were sited in the North. The South received only First Battalion, Nigerian Army sited in Ibadan. Fear of domination by the North was rife in the South even as the flag of the new 'nation' was being hoisted in 1960.

Independence
Two culturally irreconcilable groups ñ the traditionalist, conservative North and the westernised progressive South thus received Independence. The North proceeded from independence to impede efforts at national integration and cohesion. Northern leaders tried to shield the northerners from their southern country men by feeding them with the propaganda that the North was culturally superior to the South, a 'fact' mischievously recognised by the British colonial power, who consequently put the South under the North. No matter the attainment of the southerners in Western education, the North would always take precedence in the allocation of resources, including posts. To buttress the effect of the propaganda, whereas Pakistanis employed by the government of the North were treated as 'nationals', southern Nigerians similarly employed were treated as expatriates and induced accordingly.

In northern urban towns such as Kaduna, Kano, Sokoto and so on, areas were demarcated into 'Federal areas' and 'Local areas'. The Nigeria Police operated only in the 'Federal areas'; they had no jurisdiction over the entire towns.

In political Nigeria, the North was predominant. The national census conducted by the British in 1959 before they left, contrary to all demographic principles, gave the North three-quarters of the 51 million people, which they said Nigerians were at that time.

This numerical advantage plus the military advantage already noted were granted to the North by the British colonial power as the northern leaders' reward for co-operating with British colonialism in Nigeria. Even the railway system the British built for Nigeria ensured that travellers from Lagos to the East, reached (they still reach) Kaduna junction in the North where they changed (and still change) to East-bound trains, a not so merry-go-round caused by there being no rail link between the East and the West, even as we are here.

By being accorded three quarters of the population of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the North could form the Federal Government without looking to the South. And it did so from independence, humouring the South by 'buying' some of them to give some semblance of credibility to the Federal Government thus formed.

The impact of all these was that, from independence in 1960 to the beginning of the civil war on July 1, 1967, Nigeria had a very low degree of national cohesion, its diverse ethnic nationalities looking inwards to themselves for political succour and survival in an incoherent polity. Socio-political integration was further undermined by the lack of meaningful universal symbols (common heritage and common historical past), for example, that could have bound the Nigerian polity together.

Furthermore, because all Nigerians did not share common colonial experience, their outlooks, world-view as well as expectations, naturally diverged.

In 1960, willy-nilly, very large ethnic collectivities with diverse, almost unimaginable cultures were aggregated into an independent nation state by the departing colonial power, Britain. They did other very obnoxious things. They created a lop-sided geography of Nigeria, giving the North three quarters of the country's landmass and a population twice that of the entire South.

While they were at it, they operated a system of indirect rule in the North and direct rule in the South; and whereas they encouraged the missionaries to popularise education and assist in the education of the South, they deliberately left the North to their own devices in matters of education, as it were, encouraging the North to reject Western for Islamic education only.

The story was told by the late Mallam Aminu Kano himself (a true and convinced nationalist) of how, when he opted to study law instead of going to the teachers' college decreed by the British District Officer (D.O), his father was summoned by the district head and berated and threatened with sanction if he failed to convince his 'errant son' to drop his idea of studying law for primary school teaching, which the D.O. decreed. The young Aminu said he had to obey to save his poor parent from threatened indignities for producing a son who defied the British design on education for the North.

In other words, the British deliberately prepared two pseudo nations of Nigeria: A conservative, sectarian pan-Arabist North, and a Westernised secular South. This dichotomy of North and South has remained with us. We all know how efforts to balance the ethnic and political and religious equation of the North and South led to Chief Awolowo's treasonable felony trial of 1962, and also to the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70.

After the civil war, the administration of Gen. Gowon tried to reunite the country. But the power base, which controlled him, had other, more covert ideas about Nigerian unity; they saw it in terms of power class in the North uniting to control the centre and the South. And national unity meant the co-option of some southerners as out-groups operating with the in-group ruling class of the North, but peripherally-often unaware of what is going on.

When Gen. Gowon seemed to be overstepping the bounds of their design on national unity, he was eased off. The series of coups continued until we arrived at Gen. Babangida from whose regime the phase 'hidden agenda' became prevalent in the national media and among the populace. If Gen. Babangida prepared the groundwork for a hidden agenda in obedience to the power class, which was also known to southerners as the 'Mafia', it took an Abacha to implement the now not so hidden agenda with bare-faced dare devilry.

We all know how the Federal Government and national power was seized to the apparent disadvantage of the South; we know about June 12, about Bashorun Moshood Abiola and his wife; about Pa Rewane. I will not repeat known history. The Oputa tribunal has opened the lid on the horrendous crimes of one man against so many. Abacha sought to bridge the dichotomy of Nigeria by welding the country into a tyranny, tyrannised (not governed) and milked and deprived by the power class of the far North.

It betrays a high degree of ignorance if not outright deception, to suggest that the series of constitutional conferences that were held in London between 1953 and 1958 showed that the nations in Nigeria, speaking through their delegates, agreed to accept Nigeria as a multinational state. And that the various nationalities in Nigeria as they were, laid down the conditions for accepting and operating such a multinational state that we now have.'

In the first place, the sculptor of Nigeria carved into three inequitable regions not based on nationality boundaries. Each of the regions consists of multinational structure itself too. Denationalisation was the modus operandi of the British colonialists. Nations were, therefore, not recognised during the constitutional conferences. As such the nations in Nigeria could not have sent delegates, neither could they all have been represented in those conferences! Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who was reported to have dared a request for independence for the Yoruba nation, was cautioned and threatened with a charge for an act of rebellion. How could the United Kingdom that does not reckon with the Irish at home have reckoned with the nationalities in Nigeria? Not only that, Britain, in the first instance, signed agreement for protection not with representatives of nations but with a definite city-state (Lagos), Kingdoms (Benin) and caliphate (Sokoto), etc. However, on de-colonisation, Britain returned power not to the original communities with which she entered into agreement at the making of colonialism, but to a new set of interest groups she had nurtured as its own rather than representatives of the respective nations.

Even as erudite political figure as Chief Azikiwe was, he did not seem to have appreciated the significance of the individual nations in Nigeria, otherwise he would not have contemplated being the Premier of the old Western Region, a region dominated by the Yoruba. He later understood the message, ran to the East to become the Premier of the Eastern Region where the Igbo nation predominates.

Thus having regained sovereign authority, the New Republic did not recognise the nations in Nigeria either. The military politicians too did not help matters. They continued with the denationalisation principle and failed to recognise or reckon with the nations in Nigeria. Any matters relating to inter-nationality issues were decreed against and tagged 'no go areas'. The ongoing, ceaseless agitation for a Sovereign National Conference to discuss issues affecting the lives of the nations in Nigeria, is still being resisted despite the large number of nationalities that favour the call. This resistance confirms the very essence of an amalgam: wherever it may be, its nature encourages a segment of the amalgam to oppress, dominate and dictate to the rest.

This was the picture of Nigeria up to the start of the civil war in July 1967, following secession of the Eastern Region from Nigeria. During that war, the far North relaxed its political stranglehold on Nigeria, and together with what remained of Nigeria, prosecuted the war against the Republic of Biafra.

When a nation or state abdicates its responsibility for security, welfare and socio-political and economic well being of its constituent ethnic groups, through its seizure by a group, of state power and resource mainly for the selfish end of the groups, the collectivity ceases to be a nation, but a tyranny; it also thus invites the groups, so deprived to seek redress outside the due process. Human societies are created and sustained by humans. It follows, therefore, that for human societies to thrive, prosper and perpetuate, a condition of mutual appreciation, mutual respect and understanding must prevail. Conflicts are natural to man and must exist. Some conflicts are eventually beneficial when, at their resolution, further social integration is achieved in the community. It is a different matter when cultural groups in a society live in near permanent state of mutual antagonism.

As Robert Maciver observes 'under all conditions the discrimination of one group against another is detrimental to the well being of the community. Those who are discriminated against are balked in their social impulse, are prevented from developing their capacities, become warped or frustrated, secretly or openly nurse a spirit of animosity against the dominant group. Energies that otherwise might have been devoted to constructive service are diverted and consumed in the friction of fruitless conflict. The dominant group, fearing the loss of its privileges, takes its stand on a traditional conservatism and loses the power of adapting itself to the changing times'.

What followed has survived the retreat of the military from political powers: national desires and interests and group aims diverged. National institutions could not developed or operate effectively; social control became ineffective, and channels of communication shrank and the syndrome of disintegration grew. Corruption rose to unprecedented dimension. Society surrendered to vice and vicious criminals. All this happened in Nigeria between 1985 and 1999. It is a key reason Nigerians felt alienated and insecure, and either left the country or turn their backs. The economic disorganisation of the period is still with us.

Today, two and a half years after the institution of a popularly elected civilian government, observe the political behaviour of Nigerians; their tendency to obey the law or to evade it; the reaction of state governments to the federal government; how Nigerians pursue their political interests and you will conclude that disenchantment rather than inexperience in the democratic process is the spur to their defiance or indifference.

We may search from here to eternity for economic or political solution for Nigeria's mute corporate crises. Unless its overriding element, which is human and cultural, is sorted out, we would be doing no more than merely bandaging a festering sore! Nigerians must talk! National Conference is indicated!

What type of omen can we call it? That Nigerians are locked in a lively debate over form, over the form of relationship under which to continue to live together is not altogether bad. But when this soul-searching is coming, and with dogged intensity forty one years after the inception of the First Republic, and in the wake of the disengagement from political power of national military dominated by a rapacious and largely divisive sectional elite, it becomes an omen. But what type of omen!

After many years of calling a spade 'an implement', Nigerians are loosening up. A spade is becoming a spade. Recently, the governors of the South met ñ seventeen of them; and after their deliberations told the federal government unequivocally they intended to control their own resources ñ a euphemism for what Nigerians call true federalism. In reaction to the Southern Governors, two prominent Nigerians spoke ñ one a Federal Minister, the other a State Governor. What they said, in effect, is that 'true federalism' is impracticable in Nigeria. If the State Governor expressed the opinion of his state, whose opinion did the Federal Minister express? Can the Federal Minister of Information and National Orientation, as the chief spokesman of the federation, publicly express an opinion other than that of the federal government on an issue on which the nation is divided?

As Federal Minister and the nation's chief spokesman, the honourable Minister wanted a spirit of relative detachment, otherwise his patriotism could be mistaken for partisanship, or an attempt prematurely to close a national debate before stakeholders had time to exhaust their active interest in it.

It seems that some contributors to this crucial debate have forgotten that the word 'federal' was not pinned on Nigeria by the military. The federal status was conferred on Nigeria by her Independence Constitution, which took very serious cognisance of its very diverse cultures, the varied levels of development in these diverse cultures, and the inevitable need to allow each part of the whole to decide the nature, orientation, pace and philosophy of their development, that is to say, to decide their own destiny.

For sometime now, everybody has been talking, but what do we want and what do we hope to achieve?

The Hausa/Fulani know what they want. They want Sharia or the Islamic System in which they hope to govern themselves and discard the current Nigerian Constitution. Whether we like it or not, they do not want their Head of State to be a Christian or southerner.

The Igbo want a system of government in which all the machinery of government will be in their hands for their region or zone, that is, control of their police, army, telecom, electricity, etc., and as such they advocate a confederation.

But what do the Yoruba want? Are they now contented just because a Yoruba man is the President? What happens if he fails to win a second term? Even if he wins, will the Yoruba be contented with having to wait a whole forty years before one of us becomes a President again?

Now what is our answer to the above? Do we wait for the next ten years when there will no longer be employment opportunities for our children, and our school leavers and university graduates will have to go to Abuja for employment, just as we too now have to go to Abuja to look for contracts? What is wrong in our agitating for a relocation of the headquarters of the three arms of government to be sited in the three former regions? That is the Executive arm of government in Abuja; Judicial headquarters in Enugu; and the Legislative arm in Ibadan or Lagos if indeed Nigeria wants to build a nation from the present building blocks? If 60 per cent of the banks are in Lagos, why shouldn't the headquarters of the CBN be in Lagos?

The Hausa/Fulani had demonstrated their love for themselves by putting themselves at the head of every notable Federal Government institution: CBN, NNPC, Armed Forces, Customs, Police, etc., during the regimes of Gen. Babangida and Abacha. The Igbo continue to help themselves through contributions to their ethnic associations, employing Igbo in any institution they head, etc.

This tendency lends credence to individuation, which is the utmost progressive stage in the development of humanity. Globalisation on the other hand must be met with a strong native-based culture or else a nation evaporates in the heat generated by crude globalisation. In many cases, the human core out of which a new civilisation is born, seems to be organised in relatively small tribes of several hundred or thousand members, which share their life in a communal spirit.

Towards the National Conference
Nigerians must talk! National Conference is indicated! In Nigeria's forty one years of corporate existence, during which it experienced many crises and a civil war, religion did not pose the kind of threat being experienced in recent times. In their wisdom and discernment, the founding fathers of this country accepted secularism as insurance against religious intolerance and sectarian violence.

Most Nigerians know what the country's mock Constitution says about Sharia. One is baffled, therefore, by the Federal Government's seeming confidence about, or indifference to this potentially, very explosive issue. Either the Federal Government has bought the central contention of the Sharia apostles, namely that Sharia can coexist with secularism and therefore, the Constitution is intact not breached, or it is tactically silent. Whichever it is, the government is losing the initiative. And this is laying it dangerously open. Nigerians are not like inhabitants of the Disneyland ñ inanimate. They are human and live and watching!

Sharia has had effect of polarising the ruling party ñ the People's Democratic Party (PDP), whose members are actors on both sides of the Sharia poles. As a political party, its consensual mechanism seems wrecked ñ a very unhealthy development for the transitional government of a beleaguered polity. Freedom of worship and of conscience, is a constitutional as well as democratic guarantee. In any free and democratic society, the majority are in the ascendant. But their right is not limitless. It is limited by what is implied in these guarantees, namely that 'men shall not use the facilities of liberty to impair liberty'.

'The dominated, unless they are sunk in the worse apathy of sullen impotence, respond to subversive doctrines that do not look beyond the overthrow of the authority they resent. Each side conceives a false image of the other, denying their common humanity, and the community is torn asunder'.

By catering to the interests only of parts of the federation rather than the whole, by subverting social justice, by reducing the South to a colonial territory depriving it socially, educationally and economically as well as sponsoring state terror against it and personalising state power and resource in the overall-interest of his ethnic group, Gen. Abacha brought Nigeria to the condition described above, namely, where 'each side (in the Nigerian dichotomy) conceives a false image of the other, denying their common humanity, and the community is torn asunder.' Nigeria ceased to be a nation!

But because many of the groups so tyrannised are not 'sunk in the worse apathy of sullen impotence', all over the country organisations of ethnic nationalities ranged themselves against tyranny: NADECO (country-wide), MOSOP (Ogoni), Ijaw Youths, Egbesu Youths (DELTA), OPC (Yoruba), Igbo Youths, Bakasi Boys (IGBOS), Ijaw National Council, Tiv Organisations, among numerous other organisations. It was clear to them that the Nigerian State no longer represented their cherished national or nationality interests. Nigeria could not be called a nation in such circumstances, but a pretender to nationhood, a market-place of disparate cultures, with nothing in common save flag, coat of arms, and football, the fever of which created temporary national fervour until we were defeated.

We know all about our ethnically divisive colonial heritage, we know of the divide-and-rule tactic of the military, its lack of patriotism, its corruption and rapacity, its destruction of the national education, national morality and other values, its impediment to the development of a national society, its destruction of all national infrastructure.

This chequered and calamitous history is now behind us. Or are they not? A democracy government is now in place. Are we now developing the political skills, the ethos, which will enable us to cope with our ethnically and religiously pluralistic society? Are we learning to tolerate religious and ethnic diversity?

I doubt it! Although our democracy is barely two years old, the signs are not of good augury. The owl is still hooting ominously over Nigeria. We are all conscious of the fact that relationships were harmed in Nigeria during the garrison era. And deep-rooted disenchantment is manifesting in many guises.

If we accepted that the military damaged many things in the many years they tinkered with political power and governance, we must also accept that they did not spare socio-political relationships across the country. It should be realised that significant social conflicts or disenchantment follow the significant divisions of interests in the polity and these cleavages of interests are impeding post-military integrative processes.

The call for a National Conference must be intensified. Nigerians deserve the opportunity to mediate their own multilateral conflicts through a national conference. The importance of such a conference is its physical face-to-face nature. There can be little doubt that by understanding the interests, perspectives and the total situations of the various groups making demand on the polity and its leadership, decision could be reached for a durable social order. Some of such decisions could serve as inputs to the Constitution.

Politics and economics are possible only in peaceful human environments.
Our colonial masters drew the present map of Nigeria. This is one of the reasons for the ceaseless agitation and instability within it. The National Conference will afford the people to draw up the map of Nigeria not on paper but in their minds for Nigerians to dwell in their Nigeria.

The far North has become legally sectarian, having adopted the Sharia legal system even as the Federal Constitution says Nigeria is a secular state; other religions are not tolerated in the Sharia states and sectarian terrorism has claimed more than two thousand Nigerian lives in these states since the inception of Sharia in our democracy. The Oputa Tribunal on Human Rights, a lawful body set up by the Federal Government, was spurned and the law of the land defied by three generals of northern origin. They thus felt themselves above the law and the Constitution of the land.

We are operating a confusion-oriented Constitution contrived by one discredited military dictator and revised by another equally discredited military dictator, and this rather obnoxious Constitution changes like the chameleon, depending on what is on the table.

So, where are we?

What is to done?

Is Nigeria a nation? Earlier in this paper I talked of our need to provide ourselves with a fitting overcoat against the very biting cold wind of our political life. That overcoat is a National Constitution; a suitable Constitution crafted on the outcome of a spirited meeting of the ethnic nationalities, national conference. This approach has been suggested times without number. Nigeria's ethnic nationalities must sit around a table and seriously renegotiate the nature of their corporate relationship.

A Constitution emerging from this national conference will take care of the geo-political realities of this country. Until this is done Nigeria will remain a mere collectivity of disparate and mutually indifferent ethnic nationalities interacting through sheer habit, but engaged in conflict over the control of national power and resources, and still living together only by the Grace of Almighty God.

It is this Grace that has kept Nigeria together as a name, and not a nation! May God grant us good sense!