Tonnie Iredia
One obvious subject that has continued to elude the Nigerian nation is
integration. Neither the political structure nor the law of the land is
sufficiently positioned to redress the situation. The state of origin of
every Nigerian has remained the most important ticket for getting
anything.
At youth level, many Nigerians are favoured or deprived by the quota
system of admission to schools- a system which accepts a scenario where
two pupils of the same school write the same examination for admission
into the same college and it is the pupil with the lower score that gets
admitted because of his state of origin! At adult level, the situation
is no less inexplicable. The other day, I read the story of an engineer
in one organization complaining that his assistant was lifted to become
his head of section. In the past, that could only happen where the
position concerned was political.
To have an example of it now at a technocrat and purely professional
position of senior engineer shows that there is cause for worry.
In the larger environment, ethnic groups in Nigeria cohabit under a
cover of mutual distrust and suspicion with each scheming to undo the
other. The majority groups naturally have the upper hand and they tell
the rest us that Nigerians are Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba.
In fact, once one of them gets a position, the next consideration is
what goes to the other two. Among the minorities, the bigger groups hold
tight to whatever is available in their areas. For this reason, ethnic
groups like Igede, Etulo, Abakwa and the Idoma may as well forget ever
occupying the office of governor of Benue State. It appears reserved for
the Tiv because they are the majority.
My Idoma in-law always wished that his ethnic group was located in my
own Edo State where according to him the majority sometimes concedes
power to the minorities. At this point, I had to straighten the records
by summarizing for him a lecture I delivered in Benin the previous week
titled, “Benin: Time to sow the seeds of resurgence”.
I recalled that although the Benins are the majority in Edo State,
neither the incumbent state governor nor the minister representing the
state in the federal cabinet is one of theirs. On its face value, one
may be misled into seeing the Benins as liberal-minded and
accommodating. The truth however is that at this point in history; the
Benins are just a sleeping majority. The last time one of them got into
the federal cabinet, he was made a junior minister when some other
states had two full ministers.
Till date, no one knows or asked who negotiated that for the Benins.
The story is the same even outside of politics. For example, although
the Catholic faith came to Benin over one hundred years ago, no Benin
man has been able to become the Catholic Archbishop of Benin. To say
such matters are ordained and directed by God is to be unfair to the
Almighty because everything is ordained by Him and because He is all
fairness, He would not disapprove of members of only one tribe moving up
towards the apex of their occupation. Why can’t a Benin man be the
Bishop in other peoples’ homelands? In the area of education, a Benin
man has at last become the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Benin
after 40 years of its existence. The puerile argument for long that
heading a university was not an ethnic thing is a language of deceit as
only one group can head my own revered University of Ibadan.
What then is the problem of the Benins? I can see disunity, lack of
courage and selfishness among others. Yes, the Benin political class has
lately been engaged in atomistic politics, a term which aptly describes
a class that is at war with itself and thus unable to negotiate aright.
Once some wealthy individuals among the minority groups can spread
some resources around, the Benins collapse and begin to doggedly project
their benefactors. If one listens carefully, one would hear things like
that there are non-Benins with Benin interest as if other people can
love somebody more than himself. Under the circumstance, it would not be
difficult for a minority to win an election in Edo State. When compared
to what our forbearers did, the fall of the famous Benin Empire of old
shows clearly. If the late Chief Omo-Osagie was self-serving, he would
not have declined to be Premier of the new Midwest region in 1963, so
that Benin City could be the capital of the region.
The warrior Obas of Benin built an expansive wall as long as 20,000km
around the empire. The defensive edifice is the world’s longest
self-protective complex which according to the Guinness Book of Records
is the greatest earth work ever constructed by man. Today, the Benins
have only one town-Benin City-all their other areas remain villages.
No one else except the Benins can take responsibility for their poor
state of affairs. They must thus rise now and take their destiny in
their own hands because it will be unacceptable to posterity that the
Benins were marginalized as a minority tribe in Nigeria and at the same
time allowed themselves to also be marginalized in a state where they
are in majority. To worry that some people would describe this argument
as parochial is to overlook the imperatives of competitive ethnicity in a
multi-ethnic society like ours . Some people may not like it but the
truth is that ethnicity is one of the ‘settled’ issues of our
federalism. If not, we would not have had an arrangement where our
President had to go to his ‘place’ to register and to vote during the
last general elections. But for the same over-all importance of
ethnicity, zoning would not have assumed its important status in our
political structure. Abia State would not have disengaged from its
public service more than 1,800 workers of Anambra State origin. The
indigene-settler imbroglio in Jos, Plateau State would not have been as
fatal as it has become.
These and many more examples of inter-ethnic problems in Nigeria
confirm that ethnicity is still the decider of all matters in the
country as it was in those days when the late sage, Obafemi Awolowo who
has been aptly described as the best President Nigeria never had, could
not win either the General election of 1959 or the Presidential
elections of 1979 and 1983.The United States which like Nigeria is
heterogeneous does not have our type of problem because ethnicity is not
worshipped there.
An American citizen born and bred in a place does not go in search of
his ancestry to identify with a group so as to participate in any
event. Until we take the issue of integration seriously, our ethnic
groups would justifiably be engaged in cut-throat competition. Those
who avoid it through self-centered rationalizations would naturally
decline because every other ethnic category has its own agenda.
Vanguard
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