'One Nigeria' is a mere verbal expression

Chuks Oluigbo

Anyone whose knowledge of Nigerian history is even as little as a mustard seed could guess correctly the origin of the title of this piece. It was Obafemi Awolowo, the late premier of Western Nigeria, who made the famous statement that “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression.”

That statement, uttered in 1947, has proved to be prophetic. Today, nearly 70 years after it was first uttered, Nigeria has yet to attain nationhood and has, therefore, remained a mere geographical expression. There is neither coherence nor cohesion. By the same token, ‘One Nigeria’, a phrase many a Nigerian political opportunist – I detest to address them as leaders because leadership entails higher ideals which they do not possess – likes to bandy when it is convenient, has also remained a mere verbal expression.

To begin with, it’s any easy thing to profess ‘One Nigeria’; to live it or work towards a truly one Nigeria is an entirely different matter. As they say, talk is cheap; walking the talk is where the job lies.

Many who so liberally profess ‘One Nigeria’, politicians as well as their cohorts, do so with their tongue in their cheek. They do not believe in it. Let the occasion call for it and you see them unabashedly display their ethnic biases.

That is why you find that no one is actually building the Nigerian nation, least of all the current administration of Muhammadu Buhari, who pontificated on his ethnic/regional neutrality in his inaugural speech: ‘I belong to everyone and I belong to no one’. (Even that line was alleged to have been plagiarised). But now we know better. Indeed, we now know, and we have seen it in action, that the part of the country that gave President Buhari 97 percent votes cannot be treated the same way as the section that gave him a paltry 5 percent. And by the president’s own admission, that’s only fair. After all, a labourer deserves his wages; even the Holy Bible says so. And considering his inability so far to manage the economy, we can at least make do with his ‘97 percent/5 percent’ legacy. As they say in Warri, at all at all na witch.

That’s also why I don’t believe all the balderdash about detribalised Nigerians. See, no Nigerian is detribalised, not even those born in the comfort of Europe and America, though some are more tribalistic than others. But, fundamentally, we all think like Master in Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, who says, "...the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came."

Bad as this may be, the main reason for it is the absence of a unifying factor. There is no Nigerian Dream that every Nigerian can identify with and rally around. Not even our so-called nationalists worked for ‘One Nigeria’. While wearing the toga of nationalists, they were in truth pseudo nationalists who played the ethnic card whenever it suited their whims and caprices. We are where we are today because those before us left no good examples for us to copy.   

In a speech to the NCNC caucus on May 12, 1953 in Yaba, Lagos, in which he urged the North to reconsider their stand on secession, Nnamdi Azikiwe talked about our “indissoluble union which nature has formed” between the North and South.

“In my personal opinion, there is no sense in the North breaking away or the East or the West breaking away; it would be better if all the regions would address themselves to the task of crystallising common nationality irrespective of the extraneous influences at work. What history has joined together, let no man put asunder,” he said.

But Azikiwe played the ethnic card against Eyo Ita in Enugu when it was convenient. That was after Awolowo had also played the ethnic card against Azikiwe in Western Nigeria. Ahmadu Bello never believed we could “forget our differences”.

Between 1967 and 1970, a war was fought purportedly to keep Nigeria one, wasting the lives of over three million of our compatriots. But post war, who fought to unite the country, to reintegrate the secessionist elements back into the mainstream? None. We acted, and still act, like a mother who just sat and watched her child die of hunger believing the hunger would suddenly magically disappear. No one cared to enquire, to go to the root of the matter, to understand the immediate and remote causes of the war and tackle them. Like a quack doctor, we ignored the patient’s medical history, left the causal factors of the illness and treated the symptoms instead, making full recovery impossible. Now the illness has become a recurring decimal.

Even now, I doubt if we have learnt our lesson, in spite of the constant reminders in the form of NDAvengers, MEND, IPOB, MOSOP, MASSOB, OPC, etc and the deafening calls for restructuring.

So, in my view, ‘One Nigeria’ is much like ‘One North’, a clearly opportunistic concept. It’s like the ‘independent’ in Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Even a disinterested passer-by knows that ‘independence’ is not one of the attributes of the nation’s electoral body, which, by the way, has demonstrated gross ineptitude since the exit, last year, of Attahiru Jega, through its inability to successfully conclude any election.