The 1914 Amalgamation Remains Nigeria’s Bane!

By Charles Ogbu 

Every problem Nigeria has ever faced and will ever face can be traced to that demonic event of 1914 when the British merged the Southern and Northern protectorates into one country that is today known as Nigeria.
   

Britain had only one thing in mind while carrying out the amalgamation: Their administrative and economic convenience. Nothing more. The action of the British can be compared to a man who bought both herbivorous and carnivorous animals from the market and chose to put them in one cage to make it convenient for him to transport them home. This man knew that herbivores feed on herbs and are very harmless and easygoing while carnivores feed on flesh and are most times very aggressive and violent. In other words , the herbivorous animals in that cage might end up as meat for the carnivorous ones even before the man would reach his destination. He knew all these but still chose to put both animals together.
  
Do we need the brain of Albert Einstein to figure out the fact that the welfare of these animals was the last thing on this man’s mind? Rather, all he cared about was getting them all home whether dead or alive without spending extra money for another cage and extra  fare for that new cage. 

    

Even my three-month-old niece knows that the North and South have absolutely little in common. Not the same language, not the same culture, not the same religion, not the same ancestry, not even the same worldviews and as such, can’t possibly live together as one country.

Buhari’s Uninspiring Democracy Day Speech

By Mike Ozekhome

I carefully listened to and read President Buhari’s Democracy Day Speech. I must confess that I felt quite hollow after it all. He lost a golden opportunity to engage Nigerians to buy into his change agenda. The speech did not give the much needed hope, did not fire up ebbing nationalistic and patriotic embers in Nigerians, and did not ignite the drooping and sagging dreams of Nigerians for a better tomorrow, with nerve, verve, éclat, gusto, zest and vivacity. It was bland, colourless, full of sound and fury.

*Buhari and his wife, Aisha 

By the way, I do not believe May 29 should be Nigeria’s Democracy Day. I’ve argued this over the years. It should be June 12. That was the day real democracy berthed in Nigeria.  For another day.

PMB’s speech, rather than being engaging, pacific, placatory and conciliatory, from the father of the nation to his hapless children, was bellicose, belligerent, militant, combative and simply pugnacious. I blame his speech writer for this, for woefully failing to capture, or mirror the angry and disillusioned mood of the nation, to Mr President. The speech accordingly lacked colour, panache, assurance, animation, elan and vitality.

The speech failed to address the multifanous problems, besetting Nigeria and government’s deliberate efforts at redressing them. It dwelt too much on damage assessment of the past, rather than the  panacea, the present and the future. It failed Albert Einstein’s theory that “we cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”. John Burroughs, it was, who said that “a man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else”.  PMB’s Federal Executive Council is now derisively called “Federal Excuses Council”. The speech blamed everyone else, but the government.

I hereby plead most earnestly with Niger Delta Avengers to drop their arms and come to the negotiating table with the government. Blowing up pipelines will compound, not only Nigeria’s socio-economic woes, but theirs, as well. You do not cut your nose to spite your face. But, PMB did not help matters. He threatened and talked tough. He could easily have demobilised them with assuaging and soothing words. Kind, persuasive and tranquilising words are deadlier than any armada of military force. The speech did not create for Nigeria an anti-corruption template, which seeks to extirpate it from the very root, rather than the present fight, which is merely superficially predicated on loot recovery alone. We are treating a dangerous ailment of cancer with drugs meant for skin eczema. Fighting corruption must have a template, which deals with a total re-orientation of our debased national psyche and value system from primitive acquisition, to honour, character and dignity.