By Anya O. Anya
Nigeria is the prime product of British colonial adventure in Africa. It was constituted to abstract natural resources for the benefit of the British economy. As Sir Olanihun Ajayi has reminded us: “As at 7 January 1897 there was no place or area or country called Nigeria.
The country known and called Nigeria came into being in 1897 as a result of an article in the Times of 8 January 1897 by Flora Shaw pressing that the aggregate of all the towns and villages or the protectorate consisting of many ethnic nationalities should be called Nigeria.
That aggregation of several empires, kingdoms, various nations and tribes constituted what is now known as Nigeria….” In 1900, these territories were organised into the Southern and Northern Protectorate which were amalgamated in 1914 into the country now called Nigeria. The amalgamation expectedly was designed to conserve British interests and convenience.
As documents available in British Documents at the End of Empire (BDEE) attest, it was designed to ensure that the surplus revenue from the Southern Protectorates were utilised to offset the deficit of the Northern Protectorates. That British interest had primacy has been underscored by the observation that: “….prior to independence, Nigeria’s leaders were constrained to accept the wishful premise that nearly pure British forms of Western liberal government were sufficiently suited to Nigeria’s needs and for the spontaneous evolution of social forces could be relied eventually to reconcile transparent discrepancies of history … the boundaries used… to erect the Nigerian Federal structure… owned their origin strictly to the system of British colonial administration.
Those boundaries had been devised wholly for purposes of British control, certainly not out of concern for sound principles of representation. Structural ”contradictions”, most notably the fact that the Northern segment was larger than the others put together yet was also the poorest, educationally most disadvantaged and the least prepared culturally to engage in the secular games of modern democratic polities, abounded…”
That the seeds of economic disabilities and structural deformities between the regions carried over from the colonial to the present have proved a major constraint to the efforts at building a modern nation-state can be illustrated from different episodes of our national history. This is not to say that the evident imbalances could not be redressed, given a patriotic, visionary and national leadership. But this has been lacking.
In any case given over fifty years of co-evolution and co-existence of the nationalities new centres of equilibrium could have emerged to mould and drive new social forces in the direction of integration and harmonious coexistence.
That this has not happened is the modern day dilemma that Nigerians and their friends must face. Contemporary Nigeria: Contemporary Nigeria is poised on a knife-edge. On the one hand are arrayed the forces of retrogression such as Boko Haram ready to drive the nation into the abyss never to rise again-sectarian conflicts with their attendant violence, divisiveness propelled by ethnic, religious or social inequalities and inequities.
On the other hand are progressive forces pushing for economic and desirable social reforms. Indeed, the progressive institutionalisation of some of these reforms has led many outside observers such as Goldmann Sachs and the rating agencies to regard Nigeria as one of the emerging economic forces of the age of globalisation. If all goes well and Nigeria holds out, it has been said that the country may be unrecognisable in 5-7 years when compared with her dismal present.
How can these contradictory visions of the Nigerian future emerge and co-exist from the same reality? There is among the youth a sense of alienation, anomie and a brooding angst at what they regard as their betrayal by the post-independence generation of leaders particularly the military when they held sway in governance. Nasir el Rufai has given a graphic account of this leadership and its failures. Given the unacceptably high unemployment rates, the sense of deprivation amongst the youth is to be expected but this comes at a time that there is a total collapse of our values. High rate of corruption in both the public and private sectors as recently sign-posted by both the pension and petroleum subsidy scams are prevalent.
The 419 scam is, as they would say, old hat. The collapse of the educational system has been facilitated by the high rates of examination malpractices often encouraged and facilitated by parents, teachers and those who would normally have passed off as role models. The total discount of merit and scant regard for excellence are emblems of the new order. The worship of money and materialism is in contradistinction to the apparently high level of religious zealotry and showmanship. We are now in the era of wealth without work. Hypocrisy, insincerity and pretentious display of phoney values is the order of the day.
So, where will national redemption come from and how did we get here? The Journey to the Present: We have already alluded to the fact that the design of the economy under the British was not primarily concerned with extracting benefits for the local population but for the benefit of the metropolis. The structural misalignment of the regions was not designed to encourage harmonious and balanced development of the polity.
Hence both the economy and the emerging political structures of the new nation were ab initio on shaky grounds especially when there was decidedly a preference to shape the emerging fledging nation-state to favour the North over the other regions as the documents in the BDEE attest time and again.
Yes, the British did some good in establishing the framework for law and order, establishing the foundations of an educational and health system and building the foundations of a money economy. As experienced mothers can testify, you cannot expect a harmonious and peaceful family when there is evidence that some children are favoured above some others.
It might be expected that over years of mutual interaction, the mixed multitude of nationalities, cultures and peoples would find a new point of equilibrium in their relationships. This could not evolve naturally in the less than free atmosphere imposed by the British in which some cultures and peoples were quarantined so to say by deliberate efforts to institute different administrative and educational systems in the North and in the South of the fledgling nation.
It is not surprising then that different parts of what was expected to function as a modern nation-state tended to develop a mind-set that amplified differences rather than the reconciliation of diversities in a manner that could be mutually beneficial.
This is underscored by the story that during one of the Constitutional Conferences in London while Dr. Azikiwe was emphasizing the need for the leaders to find common cause in the negotiations with the British, Ahmadu Bello had reminded him that we needed to understand our differences. In other words in the pre-independence years of negotiations and parleying, our founding fathers did not share a common vision of the future for the putative nation. In the process, myths substituted for realities and fantasized stereotype of the major nationalities were projected as the basis for our interaction with one another.
A house built on such a faulty foundation was bound to develop cracks. But cracks can be mended if you can get experienced, competent and trustworthy builders. These have unfortunately been unavailable to us in the necessary redesign of post-independent Nigeria. The truth is that after fifty two years of co-habitation and mutual interaction we can no longer blame the British or any other outside forces for our current unenviable situation.
The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. Confronting the Demons of the Past : It has often been said by some of our leaders that there are settled issues in the Nigerian political economy. The truth is that there are no such settled issues for we have not sincerely and dispassionately looked at the problems of Nigerian nationhood except from the vantage point of how we can take advantage of one another to advance our personal or sectional interests.
Nevertheless, it is fair to state that given the state of the global environment, breaking up Nigeria into whatever number of constituent sovereignties is not an option. Globalisation enforces mutual interaction in an interlinked matrix of economic entities. Nations separate only to cooperate in new economic formations.
That is the reality of our new world. Moving forward into the harmonious peaceful and united nation of our dreams, enforces on us the duty to get rid of some shibboleths from the past that have dogged our every step in the journey to nationhood. Prof Anya writes from Lagos To be continued
The Sun
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