Nigeria: A Nation On The Brink Of Collapse

            

By Mike Ikhariale

Anyone watching the series of unpleasant events that have taken place in Nigeria in the past few years cannot but conclude that this is a country on a calamitous plunge. The sad part of the whole development is that it does not appear as if the leadership and even the citizens themselves fully appreciate the danger that is looming headlong like an onrushing train as things have, to an exceptionally alarming extent, been treated in the habitual lackadaisical manner of “business as usual” despite the increasingly cataclysmic developments that are manifesting all around them and to which they have no rational answers.

In a way, I feel as if I have the unusual misfortune of talking ceaselessly about the danger being posed to the polity by bad leadership and corruptive political culture with no one in a position to act positively taking notice of them. For those benefiting from the ongoing misfortunes and tragedies of the country, I might have already earned the sobriquet of an alarmist and possibly that of a prophet of doom.

Nigeria, A Country Built On Lies

By Kparobo M. Ehvwubare
Four years after the amalgamation of Nigeria, an ex-Judge Stocker, described the Contraption called Nigeria as a form of system he called: The Nigerian System. He described the Nigerian system as "A setback to a condition of things resembling the barbarous ages”. As at the time, “The Nigerian system” was and is still the most infernal system that was ever designed for the express purpose of humiliating and depressing the units of any loyal and progressive community.

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The three basic principles for the successful working of the Nigerian System were and are still: 
*IGNORANCE, FEAR and MILITARY TERRORISM: Infernal – extremely evil or cruel; expressive of cruelty or befitting hell.

The Nigerian System– Designed To Fail
To restrain and subvert the greed and selfishness of the Emirs because of his consistent dread of a Jihad or holy war against him or his government in the Northern Protectorate, Lord Fredrick Lugard charmed them into submission with the princely salary and a 50% allocation of the native’s treasury funds. These funds were derived from direct taxation thereby creating a distinction, without a difference between their private and public funds.

While Sir Lugard humored at the greed of these Emirs and the ignorance of the peasant natives, he had a successful rule as a mini-god, as long as he did not tamper with their religion. Hence, the cementation of the system where only “a few were beneficiary of state funds while the peasants were at the mercy of a ruling class”. In that system, he termed as the “indirect rule” in the Northern Protectorate. He had subtly guided these Emirs {ruling class} to the center of the garden to taste the fruit of knowledge, and to be able to decipher between good and bad while the natives were left in perpetual ignorance.

Things did not work out so well when Lugard arrived the Southern Protectorate and the Lagos Colony. There, he met missionary schools in several nooks and corners, educated natives with a system of government that was designed to progress. During his presentation on taxation policy to the parliament in 1913, he was bombarded with several questions on these policies and considerations were put forward on the affordability in defense of the natives. These didn’t quite go well with the god-emperor Sir Frederick Lugard. Ignorance was not going to be a basic tool for success in the Southern Protectorate/Colony as it were in the Northern Protectorate.


Most of the Princes and some commoners of the Southern Protectorate were already scholars of western education. Hence, history reports that Sir Fredrick’s policy met with such a lamentable and disastrous failure in the Lagos Colony and Southern Provinces. The darkness of ignorance from the Northern provinces was dispelled by the people of the Southern provinces championing Rights, Liberty and Justice.

Faced with the challenges of imposing the "divide and rule by ignorance” policy of the Northern provinces on the Southern Provinces and Colony that was strongly opposed by the natives of the Southern provinces, Sir Fredrick Lugard thereby devised the sudden thoughts of creating the CONTRAPTION called UNITED NIGERIA.