Duty of Nigerian citizens in these times

Thenation

A notable historian, BANJI AKINTOYE, points out the rationale for regional integration in the Southwest and the need for Nigerian patriots to support the call for restructuring of the federation.

Old folks let most things pass. I find it difficult, however, to let pass the article by Ishaq Modibbo Kawu, which was published the February 23 Vanguard under the title: The Southwest, An Anthem, A Flag And The Justification . I believe that the current predicament of our country demands of us Nigerians to rise above certain kinds of our traditional mindset.

From all appearances, our country seems to be tottering towards some enormous – perhaps even terminal – disaster. Nigerians are killing Nigerians with a persistence unusual in our history. Large numbers of our citizens are forced to flee from places where they have long lived and done business and return to their native homelands. We all know that the growing intensification of poverty and hopelessness in our country is a cardinal driver of these troubles. Many men of goodwill in the world are putting other preoccupations aside and hurrying to offer proposals for the solution of what is becoming known worldwide as "the Nigerian problem".

These times should call on us Nigerians to rise above our usual inter-ethnic baiting in order to seek together for meaningful solutions to our country’s ills. With influential entities in the international community telling us that our country could break up in a few years, should we not make efforts to shame them by rising higher in our dealing with the problems of our country? Should we simply continue to bash one another and stumble along in the same paths that have led us to our present verge of disintegration?

Without any doubt, one significant positive in our present situation is that many Nigerians, especially persons speaking for various Nigerian nationalities, have been coming forward with ideas, proposals, and demands which they believe can make our country operate more harmoniously and prosperously. Apart from notable citizens speaking out in their own right, we have heard from many persons speaking for groups, meetings or caucuses of various nationalities – like the nations of the Delta, the Igbo nation, some of the nations of the Middle Belt, the Hausa-Fulani nation, the Yoruba nation, among others. Of the various suggestions emanating from all these voices, the commonest seems now to be that we should restructure our federation and thereby make it more rational, more workable, and more supportive of socio-economic development and progress. Many have proposed that we should do this through a National Sovereignty Conference. Others do not want a National Sovereignty Conference. At least one prominent citizen, speaking for a nationality, made the suggestion that, as part of restructuring our federation, we should include the right and processes of peaceful secession in our constitution. Even the National Assembly has been giving consideration to steps towards constitutional changes with a view to solving our problems. And the President himself has said again and again that constitutional change is a part of his agenda for our country. Our love for our country demands that we should hope and pray that this debate, this search for answers, will lead us to workable solutions.

Very obviously, the summit held in Ibadan from February 13-15 by elected officials of the states of the Southwest is a piece in this evolving national debate and search for solutions. Given the realities and the demands of these times, one would not expect to see the kind of spiteful response that Ishaq Modibbo Kawu chose to give to that Ibadan summit. It is common among us Nigerians to think (and Ishaq at least implied it in his article) that the Southwest is better off than the rest of Nigeria, but we must look carefully at that supposition these days. The Southwest has the largest number of unemployed educated youths in our country, and the largest number of highly educated citizens fleeing from the hopelessness of Nigeria to other countries in the world. Some weeks ago, even the president of Nigeria felt the need to speak out and say that the people of the Southwest are living with a dangerous kind of poverty – namely, an almost total lack of food production. One highly informed foreign observer wrote recently that the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria are living today in a level of poverty that they have never experienced in their known history. The truth of our existence as Nigerians is that we have somehow succeeded in bequeathing absolute poverty to the overwhelming majority of our people in all parts of our country, though it is true that the poverty is deeper in some parts than in others. The elected rulers of the Southwest are under desperate pressure from their people to turn things around. The elected rulers are seeking solutions. And one of the solutions that look attractive now, a solution that many of their citizens fervently propose, is economic integration in the Southwest – to make for the pooling of resources, energies, and development assets in their region.

Ishaq insinuated that secession was at the bottom of that summit in Ibadan. If he had done a bit more of investigative journalism he would have easily found that those elected rulers of the Southwest who were gathered in the summit at Ibadan did not have the luxury of time, or any kind of luxury, to consider distant things like secession. They were, and are, under pressure to produce socio-economic results now, and they are under pressure from the most educated citizenry on the African continent – and educated people are difficult people. In fact, he would have discovered that it was not these elected rulers that wrote the formal, and very impressive, programme of regional integration – that it was written by a group of our young intellectuals, who worked on it independently on their own and without any remuneration for doing it. The rest of us who have read their work are proud of them, and believe their ideas can work, and so we are joining our voices to the voices of all in urging our elected rulers to put these proposals into action without delay.

Very many, perhaps most, Nigerians who have spoken up seem to agree today that the way to restructure our federation is to make our nationalities, as much as possible, the basis for the making of the constituent units of our federation. That means that a distinct nationality should be a constituent unit of the federation, provided that very small contiguous nationalities in any part of the country may freely agree to form one constituent unit. Let us illustrate with India’s experience. India has about 2000 ethnic nationalities (compared to Nigeria’s 300), and at India’s independence in 1947, there were fears that India would break up into very many countries. The northern peoples immediately broke off and created Pakistan and Bangladesh. But many citizens began to propose that the nationalities be used as basis for forming the states in the Indian federation. The Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, rejected that proposal immediately, out of fear that it would lead to the breaking up of India; he even threatened to resign rather than touch it. But the idea got more and more popular, until even Nehru became willing to try it. By 1966, the process of restructuring India in this way was completed. The nationalities of India felt more comfortable with the new structure, and the threat and fear of disintegration essentially vanished.

This idea is becoming more and more popular in our country today. It is accepted by large numbers of citizens among probably all our nationalities. Very many Yoruba accept it too. In fact, the Yoruba have some history of attachment to this idea. When the Richard’s Constitution was made public in 1949 and comments on it were invited from the public, the Yoruba leadership (in Egbe Omo Oduduwa) proposed exactly this idea. Since then, it has manifested again and again in Yoruba thoughts about how to achieve a stable Nigeria. So it should not be seen as new that many prominent Yoruba, representing different political parties and persuasions, advocate this idea now. The writers of the Programme of Regional Integration do not seem to have thought of it while doing their write-up, but many other Yoruba groups have since brought up the thought that Regional Integration would stand on very weak footing unless it has the proper constitutional framework. A restructured Nigeria in which the nationalities form the basis of the constituent units, and in which more powers and resources would belong to the constituent units, would provide the proper framework for the operation of Regional Integration – not only for the Yoruba but for all the peoples of Nigeria. It is an idea that can benefit every Nigerian nationality and transform our country.

If Ishaq had looked beyond the surface, he would have found that there were many at least around that Ibadan summit and in the rest of Yorubaland who were urging that attention be also given to the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. Long before the summit at Ibadan (specifically on August 8, 2011) a large crowd of placard-carrying youths had marched through the streets of every capital city of the Southwest and presented to their governor and legislature the demand that the Nigerian federation be restructured and the Regional powers of the 1950s be restored to the states of Nigeria. Apparently, many Nigerians today do not remember that each Region in those times had its own flag, coat of arms, and even a representative (called Resident Commissioner) in London – all of which contributed to the Regional confidence that powered each Region’s economic progress. And on Sunday February 26, some days after the IIbadan Summit, another group addressed a press conference in Ibadan, urging the restructuring of the Nigerian federation, and proposing very precise details for the process of restructuring. The elected rulers of the Southwest are facing very tough and informed demands indeed.

Naturally, we have all tended to focus on happenings like the Boko Haram bombings, but we need to take note too that the same factors that are propelling their kind of revolution (growing poverty and hopelessness) are also propelling different kinds of revolution in all parts of our country. Our people’s rejection of poverty, excessive use of power, insensitive governance, corruption, and destructive over-centralisation of power and resources, is mounting to a peak. Its expression will differ from area to area of our country. In most places, the big actors would use anthems and flags and music to mobilise support or to impress constituencies. It is the responsibility of those charged with the duty of monitoring the voices of our national society to endeavour to hear those voices correctly and report them faithfully.

A lot of Nigerians know the roots of the harsh conditions of their lives. Many know that the excessive concentration of power and resources in the hands of our central authorities has robbed us of the regional and local energies that advanced our country’s economic development in the 1950s and early 1960s. For instance, take a hard look at the root factors of the very harsh poverty in our Northern Region. Our three Regional governments of the 1950s and early 1960s had carefully managed our humble economic pillars of those years – cocoa in the West, palm produce in East, groundnuts in the North. In the course of the late 1960s and 1970s, under the centralizing zeal of successive military governments, and under policies which shifted all attention to petroleum, the support systems for the farmers who produced our export crops all collapsed. Unfortunately, a terrible drought also ravaged our far North at the time when these destructive policies were beginning to have effect. As a result, while we were still able to export 675,000 tons of groundnuts by 1968, we could export only 25,000 tons by 1973. By 1979, we were no longer a serious exporter of groundnuts. What this means is that this source of income to our farmers and their families, and to our country, was wiped out within a few years. It is not difficult to imagine the contribution of this economic disaster to the making of poverty in our North. And that is only one of countless examples - affecting all parts of our country. Even today, rather than change course, our rulers have continued to intensify those kinds of policies.

The struggle to revive our regional and local energies is already on. Misrepresenting that struggle as something else is unfair to our poor people and to our country. Our common desire to be citizens of a stable, progressive and prosperous country should, in these hard times, supersede other political and sectional considerations.